After a 15 month break due to Covid we recently restarted Havdalah services at Chabad on Saturday nights 20 minutes after the conclusion of Shabbat. We pray evening services, recite Havdalah, sing a song and settle down with refreshments to watch the weekly segment of the Living Torah series with inspirational teachings and stories of the Rebbe produced by Jewish Educational Media. Last week we watched a brief excerpt from an interview of a fellow who was struggling with his wife’s insistence to start keeping a kosher home and other Jewish practices. One evening he accompanied his wife to an audience with the Rebbe and asked the Rebbe in writing why G-d really cared if the dairy spoon mixed a pot of chicken soup. Does G-d really care about all the nitty-gritty details of Jewish observance? What’s all the angst about? “I don’t understand your question,” the Rebbe responded. “Mitzvot are not for G-d. They are for us. So that we should be able to have a relationship with G-d.” Here was a Jew annoyed about his Jewishness and uninterested in the whole concept of observance, and the Rebbe tells him that by wrapping Tefillin and eating a kosher sandwich he will be nurturing his relationship with G-d, even before he studies the entire Torah and achieves spiritual greatness. Is it possible for your run-of-the-mill Jew to have a real relationship with G-d? This week we begin learning the fifth book of the Torah “Devarim.” You will notice the genre is vastly different from the first four books of the Torah. While the others are written in third-person (“G-d spoke to Moses”) this one is written in first-person (“G-d spoke to me”). The fact that every word in the Torah was transcribed by Moses through divine communication is foundational to Jewish belief, but the change of tone in Devarim is symbolic of a profound aspect of our relationship with G-d. Torah was given to bridge the truly insurmountable gap between mortal physical human beings and our creator. The first four books were written as a transparent divine communication that uplifts us from the mundane and physical experience, allowing us to experience spiritual transcendence. The fifth book speaks in the language of the human experience, signaling that a relationship with G-d can be achieved even while still entrenched in the mundane and ordinary physical experience. Through wrapping Tefillin, lighting Shabbat candles, eating kosher and giving charity you develop a real relationship with G-d despite your lack of spiritual feeling and experience. If you feel the same after doing a mitzvah, you’re still on the right track, because G-d is genuinely present in the human experience as well, not just in spiritual transcendence. Saturday night and Sunday we will observe Tisha B’av - commemorating the destruction of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem around 2,000 years ago. The Holy Temple was a space where Jews experienced spiritual transcendence on a daily basis and since its destruction much of the spiritual pomp and ceremony of Judaism ceased. Devarim teaches us however that we continue to have a genuine and profound relationship with G-d even in our bleak and dreary exile. Even without feeling it, each time we do a mitzvah we prepare our world for an era of true global peace and tranquility, with the rebuilding of the Holy Temple through Moshiach, may it happen immediately.
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