Weekly Dvar Torah: Get Spiritual

What should be our dreams and aspirations for the new year?

Let’s get spiritual.

We all have desires, we all have our passions, we all have our indulgences, we all enjoy pleasures.

One gets pleasure committing crime, because he wants to eat, dress, and feel good, and he’ll get it at any cost.

One gets pleasure from eating good food. One gets pleasure from getting high using substances. One gets pleasure from wearing nice clothing and jewelry. One gets pleasure from passionate relationships.

One gets pleasure from music. One gets pleasure from helping others. One gets pleasure from intellectual study. One gets pleasure from philosophy. One gets pleasure from spirituality.

We all have our opinions about all these pleasures, is this what we desire or what we reject. Some of these pleasures belong to the self-centered nobody-but-me, materialistic personality.

So, when we close a year, and we reflect on life, we should take stock and see how we can resolve to grow the next year.

Let’s think.

We can take the pleasure of committing crime, to kill our self-centered ego-centric indulgences.

We can take the pleasure of eating good food, to eat to be healthy and live the right life, and to honor Shabbos and Yomtov with a feast.

We can take the pleasure of getting a high, by thinking of a higher power.

We can take the pleasure of nice clothing and jewelry, to decorate our Torah and beautify our Mitzvos and holy places to look beautiful and appropriately honor G-d.

We can take the pleasure of passionate relationships, to love our family and neighbors, to love G-d passionately, and make everyone happy.

We can take the pleasure of music, to connect with our soul whose language is music, and allow the spiritual soul to express itself in this mundane physical world.

We can take the pleasure of helping others not only because it makes us feel good, but because we are servicing G-d’s world and doing His will to spread kindness.

We can take the pleasure of intellectual study, to invest ourselves in studying Hashem’s Torah, His wisdom and knowledge, so that our mind is filled with G-d’s Torah, and His Torah wraps around our brain, which creates a unity and oneness with G-d like none-other.

We can take the pleasure of philosophy, to understand why G-d took us from His chamber up on high, and He put us in this physical world to fulfill a mission which will bring Him pleasure.

We can take the pleasure of spirituality, to allow our spirit to lead our body to live a purposeful meaningful life, and not a self-centered self-indulging purposeless and aimless life.

Every person understands that there is a higher power, a supreme Being, who created me and the entire universe, and He has a master plan for me, and He gave me a special mission to fill while I dwell on this earth for the allotted years that I was given, my entire life is focused on studying what G-d wants from me and how to implement my mission in life.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to be able to differentiate between the levels of the above-mentioned considerations of what life is all about.

So how does one who is materialistically inclined move up the ladder?

It can be rather simple.

Honestly, if just a single human-being who consists of over 7 octillion individual parts, and if only one cell goes awry it creates havoc and chaos in this body, and when we don’t mess-up, everything works perfectly and in sync, can this happen without the Master Creator?

But, the daily struggles of life distract us from paying attention, sometimes we remember only when something goes wrong.

The Rebbe gave us the perfect remedy, he asked us to memorize and to study a very short passage:

וְהִנֵּה הַ’ נִצָּב עָלָיו וּמְלֹא כָּל הָאָרֶץ כְּבוֹדוֹ וּמַבִּיט עָלָיו, וּבוֹחֵן כְּלָיוֹת וָלֵב אִם עוֹבְדוֹ כָּרָאוּי

I’m paraphrasing: G d Himself stands over me, and the whole world is full with His Glory, and the omnipresent looks over me, and scrutinizes my innermost, to see if I am serving Him as is fitting.

This means that when we realize that wherever we go, and wherever we are, G-d is right there beside us, what a sweet feeling this is, imagine a child knowing that he is never alone, and his parent is always there with him, he feels protected and safe, and will do anything to please his caring parent.

Just focus on this passage and watch how you will be overcome with security and serenity, and most importantly with purpose in life.

The rest is commentary.

Wishing you and yours a Happy and Healthy, Sweet New Year, 5783.

Have a resourceful Shabbos, and a renewal on Rosh Hashana,
Gut Shabbos, Gut Yomtov,

Rabbi Yosef Katzman