"I have not found that accepting Judaism makes a life that is full of happiness and filled with sugar.
It is not like this.
It doesn’t make, by definition, a more enjoyable life.
But it is a better life.
It is like drinking wine.
There are the sweet wines that even children appreciate.
They are very sweet.
They are possibly not wine, but they are sweet.
And red.
But a better wine is far more difficult to appreciate.
It is hard to teach about it.
You have to experience it to understand that it is not as sweet and not as red and not as cheap, but that it is still better.
It is something that one must educate himself about.
Good cooking is not always appreciated.
The better it is, the more you have to learn to appreciate it.
This is possibly true about every form of human achievement.
To appreciate something that is better needs an education.
It needs a certain amount of suffering.
But, when you get there, you understand it."
--Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
From Pebbles of Wisdom fromRabbi Adin Steinsaltz (forthcoming)
Read More...
Summary only...
"As long as a person identifies himself with his body and concentrates all his attention on a particular 'I' in time and space, he can never really love another person.
He can only love himself because the 'I' is the focus of his whole being.
By way of contrast, when the soul is seen as the mainspring of one’s being and as the meaning of life, there is no limit to the possibility of love because no two bodies can ever become one.
At best, they can make good use of each other.
Two souls, however, that strive together toward the primal root of things come closer and closer.
And if they continue on an ever higher plane, they can grow into a genuine unity."
--Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
From Pebbles of Wisodom from Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz (forthcoming)
Read More...
Summary only...
"The Bible and other literary creations of the Jews, such as Aggadah and the Kabbalah, abound with anthropomorphisms of all kinds, not only in relation to the deity but in every sort of description.
This humanization of the world’s reality, both of the objects and creatures lower than man and of those higher, are among the profoundly consistent aspects of the use of the holy tongue.
As one of the sages expressed it: The soul describes everything according to the configuration of its mansions, which is the body.
In other words, the world is conceptualized and its objects described by a system of metaphors based on the human body.
The language thus 'raises the lowly' by images like 'the head [top] of the mountain' and 'the foot of the mountain.'
And it ‘brings down the high' by descriptions such as the 'seat' of the Almighty, the 'hand' of God, the 'eye' of the Lord, and the like.
This use of plastic imagery and symbols is so characteristic of the language that it is hard to find a sentence in the Scriptures that is not constructed on the basis of metaphorical description rather than abstract conceptualization.
Imagery-bound concepts are to be found everywhere, in almost every paragraph of the books of law and jurisprudence as well as in poetry and literature, and serve primarily, and most strikingly, to describe all the pertains to the holy.
Precisely because of this prevalence of metaphorical statement, and the widespread use of figures of speech drawn from the human image, it becomes all the more necessary to emphasize that they are allegorical truths and not actual descriptions of reality.
For there was a certain danger that the word pictures, or imagistic descriptions, of sacred symbols in the Bible--and even more so in the Kabbalah--could lead to a crude material apprehension of the divine essence and of the higher reality."
--Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
From "The Human Image" in The Thirteen Petalled Rose by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
Read More...
Summary only...
"The secret of the positive mitzvot, the commandments to perform certain actions, lies, in a manner of speaking, in the activization of the limbs of the body, in certain movements and certain ways of doing things which are congruous with higher realities and higher relationships in other worlds.
In fact, every movement, every gesture, every habitual pattern and every isolated act that man does with his body has an effect in whole systems of essences in other dimensions with and against one another.
Clearly, an ordinary person does not know anything of this.
At best he is conscious only to a very small degree of the things he does and of their higher significance.
Even among those few who are able to unravel the riddle and know the meaning of these secrets, only select individuals reach that state of being where knowledge is automatically lived out and manifested.
It is a state where every act of a mitzvah or an impulsive movement or a dance, expresses, knowingly and unknowingly, the higher relationships--following on analogous parts of the body, in their separate as well as in their total effects."
--Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
From "The Human Image"in The Thirteen Petalled Rose by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
Read More...
Summary only...
"The fact is that the elemental sense of the Divine is not a matter of mystical realization or any kind of emotional or cerebral experience.
It is the simplest, most fundamental perception granted to all human beings, a certainty that there is a Creator, or some sort of greater reality, responsible for the world.
It is a recognition of the obvious, not an extraordinary vision of the hidden."
--Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
From Pebbles of Wisdom from Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz (forthcoming)
Read More...
Summary only...
"It may be said that for God to develop the photographic film of the world, He had to create a dark room.
And one needs a limited source of light, controlled and restricted, in order to function.
Once the desired effect is achieved, the windows can be opened.
The development of the world requires darkness, the hiddenness of space, and the obscuration of God Himself.
Divine revelation would most likely consume all of existence.
Reality as we know it would cease to be.
It is written that the prophet can hear the song of the celestial beings but he cannot see anything.
As it was said to Moses, “For no man shall look upon Me and live.”
There is this limit beyond which all is made meaningless, burned out, and extinguished.
As it is hinted in several sources in the scriptural text, any trespass of the permitted range of sanctity is a matter of utmost peril."
--Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
From Pebbles of Wisdom from Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz (forthcoming)
Read More...
Summary only...
"One of the reasons why children are often wise is that they have so much natural humility, which is the capacity to absorb things without having to relate to them critically.
This may be considered a requirement for creativity of all kinds, artistic and scientific.
Among modern physicists, the period of youth is usually known to be the time of innovation and creativity, while the later years are devoted to elaboration and teaching of the original inspirations."
--Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
From Pebbles of Wisdom from Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz (forthcoming)
Read More...
Summary only...
