| Chukat 5761 - June 29, 2001 |
A Blurry Line
The 10th commandment -- "Your shall not covet your fellow's house... You
shall not covet your fellow's wife" -- does not speak of the case in which
action is taken as a result of the coveter's desire. That would be a
transgression of the 8th commandment ("You shall not steal") or the
7th ("You shall not commit adultery"). So it is not at all apparent
that anything adverse has been done to the "fellow" in question. In
fact, I know some homeowners for whom a primary objective in building their home
was that it should be coveted by their neighbors.
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Chukat
Numbers 19:1-22:1
Torah Reading for Week of June 24 - 30, 2001
About the Red heifer (and its mother), two kinds of water (life-bearing and
strife-bearing), the passing of Miriam, Aaron's death by "divine
kiss", a brass serpent pointing heavenward, a song to a well and a battle
with giants.
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The Phoenix
She told the Rebbe that she had been advised by Jewish leaders that the phoenix
is a non-Jewish symbol. How could it be placed in Jerusalem, no less?
I was standing near the door to the Rebbe's office that night, when he called
for me and asked that I bring him the book of Job, from his bookshelf, which I
did.
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Fortysomething
The pattern is followed in every aspect of existence: there has to be an “emptiness
in the middle” in order to move from one state of being to the next.
A seed has to first dissolve in the soil before it can grow towards the light
and bloom. In a human being, emptiness becomes spiritual openness when one “lets
go,” when one nullifies one’s ego, when one’s own ego does not try to fill
and control all the space around one, but makes space for the other. The
emptiness is the necessary prelude to an entirely new and higher mode of
existence.
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Finding Joy in Changing Times
The significance of a car, indeed, the only reason for owning one, is that it
moves. For someone who can visualize a car but is incapable of conceptualizing
movement, the car exists without meaning or purpose.
We can think of the experiences that occupy our time on this earth as letters
sprinkling down on us from the Yud of G-d's four-letter name. They have
emerged from the Yud and entered our lives in order to convey us upward
to our long-awaited encounter with the face of G-d. Our problem is that we do
not recognize the design represented by these letters, and we thus tend to
misconstrue our lives as random sequences of mostly meaningless incidents.
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Convergence
We live on shifting sands where all the signposts point in a disparate array. We are surrounded by so much "stuff" -- ideas, trends, inventions, auto-proliferating information.
The past hundred years, even more so the past fifty, and most of all the past ten, have created a burning need for people who can provide points of convergence.
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You
And suddenly, one night, don’t ask me how or why, the point widened. Suddenly You were everywhere, too many places for me to reach at once, for me to contain. Suddenly I was the point of the cone and You the wide space whose width had no end.
Or so it seemed, or so it dreamed.
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