| Shabbat Shalom. |
|
| I hope this finds you well. |
|
| One of the most common things I hear from people is, “Rabbi, I wish I could come to services more often, study Talmud and Torah, and have more prayer, holiness, and spirituality in my life, but honestly, I just don’t have the time.” |
|
| Believe you me, I get it. I’m not judging at all. I’m actually very sympathetic. Folks work long hours at demanding jobs to make ends meet, and when they’re not at work, they’re at home keeping house (laundry, dishes, cooking, cleaning, mowing the lawn, weeding, etc.), and when they’re not doing that they’re picking up the kids from school, helping them with their homework, and getting them to soccer and ballet practices, B’nai Mitzvah lessons, youth group meetings, and SAT prep. And when they’re not doing that, they’re often found visiting and helping take care of an elderly parent. Even with AI, Chat GPT, autopay, texts, and Alexa, our lives are still hectic. We can’t even catch a second to relax or think, let alone have time and space for ritual, prayer, and connection with God. |
|
| I’m not going to lie, whenever I read the last lines of this week’s parsha of Tzav (Leviticus 6:1-8:36), I always get a tad bit jealous: |
|
| “‘And you [Aaron and his sons] shall not go out from the door of the tent of meeting seven days, until the days of your consecration are fulfilled; for He [God] will consecrate you seven days. As this will be done this day, so the LORD has commanded to do, to make atonement for you. And you will abide at the door of the tent of meeting day and night for seven days, and keep the charge of the LORD, so that you will not die; for so I am commanded.’ And Aaron and his sons did all the things which the LORD commanded by the hand of Moses.”(*Leviticus 8:33-36) |
|
| Obviously, this is a forced sequestration meant to prepare and purify Aaron and his sons for the immense duties and responsibilities that is the priesthood. But still, it is a time of intense holiness, deep thought and introspection, and focused spirituality, something that some many of us are forced to put on the back burners due to the plethora of demands in our daily lives. How I would love to turn off my phone, put away my computer, and sit in silence, studying Talmud and Torah, take long, silent walks hand-in-hand with my wife in the woods, and meditate and pray, talking with God throughout, for days, weeks even, on end. But like everyone else, I too, a Rabbi no less, have a myriad of responsibilities in the temporal world that keep me from this. No excuses- just the same realities that we all face. |
|
| So what’s the answer, divest ourselves of any semblance of holiness, give up on any sense of spirituality, and forgo a relationship with God? No, of course. |
|
| Perhaps the answer can best be explained by a metaphor- my wife and I, like most people, put long hours into our careers and keeping our home functioning. At the same time, we also love fitness and staying in shape. But what you do when your time is extremely limited, and you don’t have the luxury of going to the gym for an hour or two workout? One solution is to find short, intense 15-20 minute HIIT (high intensity interval training) workouts. The other is to keep dumbbells, kettlebells, stretch bands, and perfect pushups in the office and do a set or two between meetings or at the top of the hour. Both methods take full advantage of a time-constrained work schedule. And here’s the thing- the same principle can be applied to our daily Jewish lives and practice. |
|
| Judaism, believe it or not, is all about transforming seemingly everyday, mundane activities that we so often perform automatically and without any sort of forethought, into sincere and heartfelt moments of sacred holiness that connect us to God. For instance, there are prayers upon waking that thank God for allowing us to see another day (Elohai NShamaand Modeh Ani). There are prayers that are said when washing one’s hands before eating, grace before and after meals (birkat hamazon), that display gratitude for our eyesight and the clothes on our backs (nisim b’chol yom), and I kid you not, there’s even a prayer for when you go to bathroom for the first time upon waking up (i.e. a gesture of solemn gratitude for having a healthy, functioning body). Most of these elements in our lives are so normalized that we don’t even think about them as we go through the motions. However, when we apply these prayers and blessings (which are very short) to every moment of our day, the world and our lives begin to take on a different lens. |
|
| One of the great Rabbis of the 20th century, Abraham Joshua Heschel, commented extensively on this mindset, in which we use prayer at everyday moments and happenings as vehicles with which to create states of holiness. He penned: |
|
| “We do not step out of the world when we pray; we merely see the world in a different setting. The self is not the hub but the spoke of the revolving wheel. It is precisely the function of prayer to shift the center of living from self-consciousness to self-surrender.”[1] |
|
| “Awe is more than an emotion; it is a way of understanding, insight into a meaning greater than ourselves.”[2] |
|
| “The focus of prayer is not the self. … It is the momentary disregard of our personal concerns, the absence of self-centered thoughts, which constitute the art of prayer. Feeling becomes prayer in the moment in which we forget ourselves and become aware of God. … Thus, in beseeching Him for bread, there is one instant, at least, in which our mind is directed neither to our hunger nor to food, but to His mercy. This instant is prayer. We start with a personal concern and live to feel the utmost.”[3] |
|
| This D’var comes with a challenge: how will you take everyday moments and turn them into spaces of holiness and opportunities for sacred connection with God? |
|
| Wishing you a Good Shabbos and a great weekend. |
|
| Bivrakha, |
|
| Rabbi Aaron |
