COLLAPSING DUE TO NEGLECT

Yesterday I was reading letters of Rabbi Yaakov Meir Shechter, one of the contemporary Breslov leaders here in Israel, and I really liked his words about what we have to ask from Hashem, "שלום בגופנו וממוננו. ותורתנו" ("peace in our bodies, in our money, and in our Torah learning").

I thought: Rav Shechter is probably a very spiritual person, yes he realizes how important it is not to lose sight of the physical. After all, it says in "PIrkey Avos" that if there is no flour, there is no Torah. We might want to live our whole lives on the upper, spiritual floors of the building because indeed they are more important, yet if we neglect the ground floor and it collapses, there will be no building to speak about.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

WELL-GROUNDED VS. FLOATING AND DROWNING

The famous Jerusalem tzaddik Rabbi Arye Levin once said (I'm quoting from memory, so this just the idea that caught my attention and not his exact words), "When good and righteous people dream, their visions can reach Heavens but they are still firmly planted on the ground, like the ladder seen by Yaakov Avinu. Yet when evil people dream, their dreams are neither above nor below, neither reaching high nor rooted in reality; when Pharaoh had his dream, he saw himself standing at the edge of a river - neither here nor there." When I started writing for the Nanach blog, one of the conditions was that I wasn't allowed to mention any "contemporary Rabbis", which obviously included my teachers in Breslov. At first it was fun, "Hey, I have so many ideas of my own that I can write tons of posts without ever mentioning anybody else!" I saw it as an interesting challenge, and I wanted to prove that I could do this. Yet, after a while, I started to get a nagg...
Read more

"AND KNOW..."

  I was reading a Hebrew book on Halacha today and came upon the phrase ודע ("and know"). And I couldn't help thinking, "How fortunate we are!" When this phrase appears in any other book except for "Likutei Moharan", what follows is just information, however important or even vital it might be. But when Rabbeinu uses this phrase, we can be sure that he is now going to convey a revelation straight from the Olam HaAtzilus.
Read more

FROM "TEIKU" TO "TIKKUN"

My closest friend used to learn the Talmud in her youth. Then she came to the conclusion that Hashem wanted something very different from her, so she got married and had quite a few children. Yet, of course, she's continued to be a very deep person, so we often exchange deep and profound ideas. Recently she shared something very interesting. In the Talmud, the discussion sometimes ends with the word "תיקו" (" teiku "), which means that no answer has been found to that particular question. So my friend said that this "תיקו" is "תיקון" (" tikkun " - "correction") without the letter ""ן" (" nun "). Since we were discussing not the Talmud but our personal lives. she said that whenever a person feels stuck in " teiku ", being unable to find any answers to their life dilemmas, all they need to do is find that missing " nun ", and then they'll be able to turn " teiku " in...
Read more