"Rabbi Zusha was once reduced to such poverty as to lack bread.
When he was very hungry, he turned to God and said:
‘Master of the Universe, thank you for giving me an appetite’ ”
“We receive gifts from heaven, and they are always positive, even though at first glance, that is not always apparent.
Sometimes we must give them a second or even a third look before we are able to learn how to relate to them as gifts from God.
Although this explanation does not solve a person’s pain, it removes his sadness.
Although it does not resolve the problems, it removes his worries.
The sadness that a person feels comes from his perception that God has treated him unfairly, and that feeling must be eliminated.
A person can do so when he sees suffering not as a punishment but as a reward—even if it is hard to accept and even if it takes some time to learn how to relate to it.
Worry comes from thinking, What will the future bring? What if it will be even worse?
This question can be resolved when one realizes that the good will not necessarily be revealed immediately.
It may, in fact never be revealed, for some gifts appear good and others simply not.”
“It can be said that all of the worlds—and, indeed, any separate realms of being—exist only by virtue of the fact that God makes Himself hidden.
... A world can exist only as a result of the concealment of its Creator”
--Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
“Belief in God includes from the start, beginning with the Ten Commandments, two components that everyone finds difficult to grasp and to identify with.
The first is the perception of God as the One and Only, who is therefore all-embracing and all-supreme, divine, above all comprehension, and therefore far above any personal relationship to something defined and specific.
To this is compounded another difficulty, which is a faith that is entirely an abstraction, which does not allow any image, form, or other experience that can be grasped.”
“Precisely because the Divine is apprehended as an infinite, not a finite, force, everything in the cosmos, whether small or large, is only a small part of the pattern, so that there is no difference in weight or gravity between any one part and another.
The movement of a man’s finger is as important or unimportant as the most terrible catastrophe, for as against the Infinite both are of the same dimension.
Just as the Infinite can be defined as unlimited in the sense of being beyond everything, so He can be defined as being close to and touching everything.”
“An old allegory depicts the world as a small island in the middle of the sea, inhabited by birds.
To provide them with sustenance, the kingdom has arranged an intricate network of channels through which the necessary food and water flow.
So long as the birds behave as they are endowed by nature to behave, singing and soaring through the air, the flow of plenty proceeds without interruption.
But when the birds begin to play in the dirt and peck at the channels, the channels get blocked or broken and cease to function properly, and the flow from above is disrupted.
So, too, does the island that is our world depend on the proper functioning of the Sefirot.
And when they are interfered with, the system is disrupted, and the disrupting factors themselves suffer the consequences.”
“Everyone can and should learn from others the proper way of doing things, but in the end each person has to follow his own winding path to the goal that is his heart’s desire.
Some lives have an emotional emphasis;
others, an intellectual;
for some the way of joy is natural;
for others existence is full of effort and struggle;
there are people for whom purity of heart is the most difficult thing in the world, while for others it is given as a gift from birth.”
“True teshuvah is when a person craves to return to God with the same intensity, with the same turmoil, as the craving he experienced at the time of his sin.
The sin does not then become a mitzvah, but the teshuvah redirects it to function as a mitzvah does, as an impetus of bringing a person closer to God”
“In Judaism man is conceived, in all the power of his body and soul, as the central agent, the chief actor on a cosmic stage.
He functions, or performs, as a prime mover of worlds, being made in the image of the Creator.
Everything he does constitutes an act of creation, both in his own life and in other worlds hidden from his sight.
Every single particle of his body and every nuance of his thought and feeling are connected with forces of all kinds in the cosmos, forces without number.
So that the more conscious he is of this order of things, the more significantly does he function as a Jewish person”
“A basic idea underlying Jewish life is that there are no special frameworks for holiness.
A man’s relation to God is not set apart on a higher plane, not relegated to some special corner of time and place with all the rest of life taking place somewhere else.
The Jewish attitude is that life in all its aspects, in its totality, must somehow or other be bound up with holiness”
"Many books have been written about holiness and about the sense of holiness, and they all face one fundamental dilemma—how can one speak about the unspeakable?
This is the quandary of mystics, sometimes of philosophers, and even of artists.
One definition that carries with it a large measure of truth is that holiness is that which is found beyond all boundaries, that which reaches absolute infinity and absolute transcendence.
And actually, our perception of holiness can be expressed by the term—used but not coined by Freud—an “oceanic feeling,” which attempts to explain or touch upon the comprehension of holiness.
A person facing the ocean for the first time, or at any other moment of heightened sensitivity, faces something grand and immeasurable, something infinite.
The feeling of “me against infinity” is, I would imagine, the basic sensation of one who stands against the holiness.
This definition is imperfect.
The “oceanic feeling,” like the ocean itself, is finite.
Although it is very big, it is still limited.
Our perception of infinity is, in many ways, an attempt to grasp the unlimited, the unperceivable, that which cannot be understood, that which is, in essence, the unattainable, by its very definition.
The attempt to enter the realm of holiness is paradoxical.
Because I have entered it, then, by definition, it is not truly holy.
And if it is truly holy, I shall always stand outside of it.
“Every person has his own spiritual essence whose uniqueness not only is the result of his heredity and education but exists by divine intention.
For each and every human being has a specific task to perform in the world, a task that no one else can accomplish”
“In general, there are no preconceptions about what is the correct conduct for all situations, since the correctness of a way of being is itself only measurable in terms of a specific set of circumstances that may or may not recur.
There is therefore no possibility of fixing a single standard of behavior.
If anything is clear, it is that a rigid, unchanging way is wrong”
“The person who performs a mitzvah, who prays or directs his mind toward the Divine, in doing so creates an angel, which is a sort of reaching out on the part of man to the higher worlds.
Such an angel, however, connected in its essence to the man who created it, still lives, on the whole, in a different dimension of being”
“Seen as separate and unrelated commandments, each as an individual obligation and burden, the mitzvot seem to be a vast and even an absurd assortment of petty details which are, if not downright intimidating, then at the least troublesome.
What we call details, however, are only part of greater units which in turn combined in various ways into a single entity.
It is as though in examining the leaves and flowers of a tree, one were to be overwhelmed by the abundance, the variety, and the complexity of detail.
But when one realizes that it is all part of the same single growth, all part of the same branching out into manifold forms of the one tree, then the details would cease to be disturbing and would be accepted as intrinsic to the wondrousness of the whole”
“The process of the soul’s connection with the body—called the ‘descent of the soul into matter’—is, from a certain perspective, the soul’s profound tragedy.
But the soul undertakes this terrible risk as a part of the need to descend in order to make the desired assent to hitherto unknown heights.
It is a risk and a danger, because the soul’s connection with the body and its contact with the material world where it is the only factor that is free—unbounded by the determinism of physical law and able to choose and move freely—make it possible for the soul to fall and, in falling, to destroy the world.
Indeed, Creation itself, and the creation of man, is precisely such a risk, a descent for the sake of ascension.”
In the very last paragraph of the last chapter of Rabbi Steinsaltz’s book The Essential Talmud, Rabbi Steinsaltz writes:
“The work (the Talmud), a compilation of the endeavors of many generations that is edited with excessive precision and has been studied by tens of thousands of scholars, still remains a challenge.
Of the verse, ‘I have seen an end of every purpose,’ (Psalm 119) the sages said: ‘Everything has its boundaries, even Heaven and earth have their boundaries.
Only Torah has no bounds’ ”
“It may be that a specific person, many people, and even the greater part of the nation will try to escape from its inner essence, to deny it, or to exchange it—entirely or partially—for other purposes and values.
Yet every such attempt at escape and denial, even if it actually succeeds, is a failure from the inner viewpoint.
It is a denial not only of the past, of the heritage, or the national duty, however confused it may be, but an escape from the person’s essential nature.
The changes that are made by everyone are merely masks, disguises, imitations—the exchange of the essential me for other identities.
This escape may be successful externally, but it is really a kind of suicide, a denial of the main essence, an escape from the true self.”
“Love and fear are not necessarily incompatible, for any love contains, within itself, fear.
Whenever there is an object of love, there is also the fear of losing it.
This is not fear of punishment but fear of being disconnected from God.
‘Fear that is contained in love’ is, in a sense, the highest level of the fear of God, located where love and fear intertwine.
It is the foundation and distillation of Jewish life.
When we love, we cling to and are absorbed into the Source of life.
When we fear, we are afraid that we may be severed from that Source—which would mean that we were no longer alive”
“The inescapable conclusion is that, at least in the Diaspora, the Jewish people are in a demographic decline.
We are shrinking and becoming older.
If nothing dramatic occurs to reverse these trends, it may be that the Jewish community should no longer concern itself with building schools, but with constructing more old-age homes and larger cemeteries”
“Our sages say, ‘A person only sins when a spirit of insanity enters him.’
The baal teshuvah (‘penitent’) is one who cures himself of this insanity, who now realizes that he performed his previous actions without a true understanding and awareness of their significance.
With such repentance, he severs himself from his past and attains new perspective on himself and his life, on his past and his future.”
“We believe that the Law has at least 600,000 different paths within it for individuals to enter.
There is what is called ‘the private gate’ for each of us.
And we each have to find our own gate.
The search for my own particular gate can be a very arduous one.
A man may search for years and find only doorways that are not his.
He may go on through all his life without really finding it.”