23. Embrace

Intimacy with God, a sense of God's closeness and embrace, an existential realization that we are not alone—these are the answers to our prayers, not the specific fulfillment of a verbal request.



(Bradley Shavit Artson)

22. God of All
Everything you see enwraps holiness; take away the outer shell and gaze at the spiritual beauty.


Hillel Zeitlin

21. All Thank You
 
It is not You alone, or we,
  or those others who pray,
all things pray, all things
  pour forth their souls.
The heavens pray,
  the earth prays,
  every creature and
every living thing prays.
In all life, there is longing,
Creation is itself but a
  longing,
a kind of pray of the
  Almighty.
Micha Joseph Berdyczewski

20.


('Torah' referred to here can be interpreted in the broader sense of teaching or instruction, which of course is universal.  I find this writing interesting because who would think judgeship can serve spiritual refinement and attainment.  I always wondered about the Jewish people's emphasis on the law
and saw it as just the practical world.  To see it as a way to refine one's soul is enlarging.)


A person who shuns the office of judge

Judgeship brings one into the classroom closest to reality.  There a person encounters the rifts, the pains, the errors, and the suffering of the person gone wrong, and even of the intentional evildoer.  There, mercy and discernment are melded together and seek to beat a pah toward what is worthy, out of the muddy trail of life itself.  Anyone who has studied Torah and is not prepared, on the basis of what one has learned, to sit in the most contentious encounters casts off responsibility and burdens the world with frustration, which imposes costs on the litigants in the form of animosity, robbery, and false oaths—the desecration of the divine name in a world in which people consign their communities to corruption.

But one who treats the judicial process lightly is a fool—One who approaches being a judge lightly and without refinement, acting as a precipitous pace that crushes the fine strands of human experience, makes the court into a firing squad aimed at the depths of Torah.  One has learned nothing from it—not to listen, hear, learn, or teach.

Rabbi Ishmael teaches that a person need first to take the world's sorrow and corruption onto one's own shoulders, and then to take respo0nsibility with trepidation, refinement of heart, and moderation, in order to find the loose thread that leads to the sails of the spirit, and mend them.

19.

(A good case for keeping the 'other' in the loop)

One with whom people are pleased

Hanina ben Dosa upends the conversation and states:  It is not your autonomous search for a worthy cause that fills your life with value, but directing yourself beyond yourself—toward the other—that fills it with purpose.  You will not rescue yourself from emptiness; your fellow human being will.  Your fellow will be the witness who will affirm that you exist, that your life has meaning, that the world could not exist without you.  Only together will you determine whether life has meaning; you and your  fellow people will determine that from within the delicate connection between your life and theirs.

18.

Holiness

“Holy are You, holy is Your name, and holy ones praise You each day!  Holiness for us is the perfect blending of love and awe.  It is a knowing that we stand before the greatest of all terrors, and yet a knowing that causes us to flow with kindness and compassion, with love for all creatures and the One who is their life.

Arthur Green