 Our next speaker is Alan Hansen, who was born and raised LDS in northern Israel where he spent much of his life alongside a love for literature, especially British, Russian, and Israeli. His research interests include Mormonism, Judaism, biblical studies, late antiquity, journalism, Eastern European and Middle Eastern history. Alan Hansen. All right, thank you. So this is a paper that my friend Walker and I have written. I'm presenting it because it's a little bit difficult to drive from Denton to Salt Lake, from Denton, Texas. So we just had some thoughts on what as LDS we would call Zion, and we looked to both Jewish, LDS, and business management as positive psychology for this. All right. So a central teaching of Hasidic thought is that of worship through corporate reality. Without getting too technical, this doctrine meant that mundane acts can be sanctified and transformed, thereby influencing for the better cosmic processes in the divine. A verse commonly quoted was from Proverbs 3.6, In all thy ways know him. That is, everything one does can become an act of worship. It was said of one Hasidic master that he did not travel to the Magid of Mezharic's house to hear him expound Torah, but to see how he took off his shoes and how he tied his shoelaces. The same Hasidic master also decried mere preaching. The goal instead is to be Torah. Each and every action should be in such harmony with the sacred revelations of God that the act itself embodies them. Worship through corporate reality, writes Norman Lamb, brought into the domain of religious significance the entire range of human activity. There is literally nothing that's outside of it. One of the major sources for this doctrine was the Enoch where it's circulating in the medieval era. The influential Kabbalist Rabbi Isaac of Aqa was troubled by the Bible's iconic descriptions of Enoch and his heavenly ascent. The reasons for Elijah's ascension were fairly clear from the biblical text, but the Enoch passages were entirely cryptic. Rabbi Isaac turned to his teacher for help. He said that he received a tradition that Enoch was a nushkaf, a cobbler, that is, he sewed together shoes and with every incision and incision that he made using the stitching all, he blessed God. And he blessed God with a whole heart and perfect intent, extending the blessing to the emanated metatron. Never did he forget to bless during even so much as a single incision, but he would always do so until because of so much love he was not. For God took him and he merited being called metatron and his virtue is very great indeed. God and Kabbalistic thought is represented by a series of emanations. The term sefirot, each one has its own unique names and attributes. The emanated metatron was considered to be mulchut, the 10th and lowest sefirah, which is the one closest to earth. This metatron is distinct from Enoch, the creative metatron, who is merely given that title. While the quote from Rabbi Isaac is a clear theological statement, he does introduce such praetistic elements as emotion and devotion. Now living before the commandments were given to Moses, Enoch loved God and served him whole-heartedly by focusing his love and intents on God, even during such a mundane and menial act as sewing together shoes. His act of blessing caused power and vitality to flow downward to the lowest sefirah and unite the lower and upper worlds. Because of this great love Enoch had for God, he was taken up and exalted. Abstract emotion and devotion without accompanying acts do not suffice to cause a change in the world, but the same also holds true in the reverse. Acts without the proper devotion and emotion are sterile at best. They simply do not live up to their full potential. The redemption of the world occurs not through heroic acts by superhuman saints, but through the daily activities of a lowly tradesman. Now this story was frequently utilized by the 16th century Kabbalahs of Tzvat in their theoretical discussions of Kabbalah and its pietism receded into the background. Even so, it still exerted an influence on the monistic idea that profane, mundane and menial acts carried within them the potential for holiness. The same holds true for wells dug by the patriarchs, and Rabbi Isaac Luria wrote that their intentions corresponded to those for Donning philacteries, which in Judaism is one of the highest acts of devotion in daily life. The Hasidic hagiography entitled praises of the best include the story of how Rabbi Yisal Balshentov known as the best trembled when he saw a hose maker on his way to prayers. Inviting him over, the Besh questioned the hose maker about his daily activities. During the course of the interview, the man is shown to be a simple, hardworking, honest, manful of integrity and devout. In both trade and devotion, a contemporary counterpart teen looked the shoemaker. The Besh said to him, what do you do very early in the morning? He said, I make stockings at that time as well. He asked him, how do you recite the Psalms? He said to him, I recite what I can say by heart. The Besh said about him that he is the foundation of the synagogue until the coming of the Messiah. Now scholar C.P. Kaufman in a monograph on worship through corporeality observed that the majority of the hose maker's activities took place outside the synagogue. It is precisely this paradoxical situation that earns him the greatest praise. Raising the realm of the profane to that of the sacred reveals the true essence of worship and hints at the monism which will prevail with the advent of the Messiah. Reflecting on the centrality of this Enoch tradition to Hasidism, Martin Buber remarked that man exerts influence on the eternal and that this is not done by any special works but by the intention with which he does all his works. It is a teaching of the hallowing of the everyday. By using Enoch as its blueprint, Hasidism spread not only among the poor illiterate masses but among wealthy merchants as well. Indeed they were among its staunchest supporters. By invoking the Hasidic concept of worship through corporeality, the seer of Lublin resured busy merchants in his audience that they could transform business trips into paths to holiness. In the seer's own words, when a merchant travels on business he should say to himself, I'm traveling for business so that I will have money to serve God by paying for my son's tuition so that my sons will be Talmudic scholars engaging in the Torah and Mitzvot for the sake of heaven and so that I can marry my daughters to scholars and sanctify the Sabbath and give charity and in this way he connects his business to God. Enoch the shoemaker served as a blueprint not only for Hasidism but for the Mus'ar movement as well. The Lithuanian Rabbi Yisrael Solante sought to transform the Jewish world around him which he felt had become entirely immersed in ritual and outward trappings at the expense of true devotion to God and man. The vehicle for his projected revival was exacting psychological application of ethics as Mus'ar, Tal's fears of life. Now the Mus'ar movement fought against a broken and fragmentary Judaism against a narrow-minded and limited Judaism in the words of one of its scholars. It demands a consistent Judaism, a Judaism that is wide in scope and broad in vision. Half measures do not suffice in observing the Torah. Keeping well-known commandments and warnings alone will not do. The entire framework must be perfected and expanded to encompass the Torah in all of its commandments and warnings. Be they those between God and man, between man and man, between man and himself and between man and the entire world around him. For example, according to the Mus'ar movement, impatience and severity in judging others is on the same legal and moral footing as theft. Rabbi Sal saw in the pursuit of ethical perfection a communal effort, and as an initial step sought to establish among the Jewish upper middle classes groups for the study and application of Mus'ar. This segment of society was well educated, affluent, and thoroughly involved in community affairs. In Rabbi Sal's analysis of the Enoch tale, theological and theosophical elements are entirely discarded in favor of ethics. This does not mean that when Enoch sewed together shoes he was cleaving to supernal thoughts. The law forbids it for how can he be occupied with something else when he is employed on behalf of other people. Rather, the essence of his unifications was a concern that each and every stitch would be good and strong in order for people to benefit from the shoes. Thus he cleaved to the attribute of his maker, who bestows his beneficence on all, and this is how he performed unifications. Desiring nothing other than to cleave to the attributes of his maker. In the words of his modern biographer, when there was a conflict between God-centered piety or a kindness towards one's fellow man, Enoch preferred the latter, even when it meant sacrificing the former. Enoch's ascension came as a result of his intense devotion to benefiting and bettering his fellow man. This was the true essence of God's own character, so doing even a menial task to the utmost of one's ability in order to help others is indeed the highest form of imitatio dei. Doing one's job well takes precedence over studying lofty theological matters. Now, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Cook, the preeminent Jewish mystic and thinker of the 20th century, combined elements from Hasidism and Musa'u into his own thought, and provides perhaps the clearest expression of Jewish monism. For Rabbi Cook, the essence of Judaism which flows from Jewish monotheism is a passion to overcome separatism. The severance of man from God, of man from man, of man from nature. It is a passion to perfect the world through man's awareness of his links to all else in existence. It is a rejection of the alleged antagonism between the material and the spiritual. It is a rejection of every parochialism that seeks to build man's spiritual home and his structure of values by taking to itself a fragment of life and ignoring the rest. The Jewish outlook, said Rabbi Cook, is the vision of the holiness of all existence. Now this collapse of sacred distance is according to Terrell Givens, one of the hallmarks of Mormonism, and of Joseph Smith in particular. Joseph insistently refused to recognize the distinctness of those categories that were typical in traditional Christianity. The sense that there is an earthly and a heavenly, a bodily and spiritual. Every time that we think we have found an example of what we think is a dichotomy, Joseph collapse it into one. We are told by Joseph that not only is God the father embodied but was once a man as we are and is an exalted man and sits enthroned in yonder heavens. Both spirit and body become the soul of man in Joseph's hands. Spirit itself is no longer seen as an immaterial substance but a more fine or pure matter that can only be discerned by pure eyes. The gathering of Latter-day Israel was literal as was the establishment of Zion, its model being the translated city of Enoch. It was made clear that all things unto the Lord are spiritual with no temporal law ever being given. As a covenant people the Mormons felt that they were duty bound to the toil and sweat of Zion building. The need to find the divine in the mundane surely increased as the Mormons headed west and established an isolated theocratic government. As historian Matthew Bowman is noted, Brigham Young bound even more closely than had Joseph Smith the Mormon sense of themselves as a covenanted people especially chosen by God to the practical work of building a community on earth. The distance between the sacred and secular and the trail was vanishingly small. The captains of the companies routinely celebrated the Lord's Supper as they prepared decisions about when to move and what trail to take. President Young saw the work of building up Zion as a practical work and not a mere theory. The saints were not going to wait for angels or for Enoch and his company to come and build up Zion but we are going to build it. Young often spoke of present salvation brought on by the constant presence of the Spirit. It is present salvation and the present influence of the Holy Ghost that we need every day to keep us on saving ground. I preach comparatively but little about the eternities and gods and their wonderful works in eternity and do not tell who first made them nor how they were made for I know nothing about that. Life is for us and is for us to receive it today and not wait for the millennium. If the divine is an abstraction was on its deathbed with the teachings of Joseph Smith it met its ultimate demise under the reign of Brigham Young. In the mind of God said Young, there is no such thing as dividing spiritual from temporal or temporal from spiritual for they are one in the Lord. Only to those who understand the principles of life and salvation the priesthood, the oracles of truth and the gifts and callings of God to the children of men is there no difference in spiritual and temporal labors all are one. The sacred task could range from preaching, praying, labor with my hands for an honorable support whether I'm in the field, mechanics shop or following mercantile business wherever duty calls I'm serving God as much in one place as another. So it is with all each in his place turn in time. With this outlook Brigham declared that his mission was to teach the saints with regard to their everyday lives. My desires to teach the people what they should do now and let the millennium take care of itself. For Young, reducing the gospel to the present time circumstances and condition of the people was the way in which God's people should live it. The law of God in his view was the system best to live by and best to die by. It is the best for doing business it is the best for making farms for building cities and temples and we bring present security and peace. Now recalling the conversation with a gentleman who didn't think that the Mormon seemed very religious, Young explained. That is a mistake we're the most religious people on the face of the earth. We do not allow ourselves to go into a field to plow without taking our religion with us. We do not go into an office behind the counter to deal out goods into accounting house with the books or anywhere to attend or transact any business without taking our religion with us. If we are railroading or on a pleasure trip or God in our religion must be with us. Now the Mormon religion incorporates every act and word of man. No man should do it unless he doesn't in God. And this cosmological monism can be seen in other late 19th century publications. So in 1897 the millennial star talked of a Mormon Indian colony on the Mala River in Boxelder County where the local aborigines were being urged to dig an irrigation ditch. So the elder was going to be absent and he left one of the Indian converts in charge and he asked him what he would be preaching. And the reply in one of the best examples of Mormonism's own worship through corporeality. When we preach him heap water ditch water ditch. Now the Lamanite are partaken of the spirit and genius of Mormonism. Water ditch and water baptism are both vital principles of that religion. The redemption of the soul, the body and the home of man is its purpose. The redemption of the earth and its restoration to a paradisiacal state will be brought about in part by the blessing and power of God and in part by the labors and sacrifices of its inhabitants under the light of the gospel and direction of the authorized servants of God. The Lamanite had grasped the need of water ditch by means of which to redeem a portion of the earth's surface that was a desert had grasped the vital principle of the gospel of Christ. How much more time do you have? One minute. All right. So we're running out of time here but this monism established by Joseph Smith and expanded by Brigham Young was a key element in Mormonism's doctrine of eternal progression. That was as Jacob Baker explained the biggest attraction for the intellectuals in the church was idea of progression eternally and despite the platonic ideal people do not spend the majority of their time in the active deep contemplation. Instead they are performing the seemingly menial tasks of daily life. This largely consists of one's form of employment and finding meaning in the lone injury world of day-to-day work has been a point of increasing interest among management experts and organizational theorists and their findings yield very fruitful results which we can apply to more monism. So business author Daniel Pink has identified three key components. Autonomy, mastery, purpose. The second mastery is similar to flow but it means something that we're constantly seeking for and when we get all this down then we are engaged in a work which combines elements of being joy sorry elements of joy of autonomy and this activity is what gives our life meaning. Thank you. Thank you very much.