JACOB JR, MY JEWISH WORLD. STRANGERS IN A STRANGE LAND

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Sunday, Av 24, 5779. August 25, 2019.

Shalom! World.

The world belongs to the nations. We are not of the world, we are of Heaven. We are strangers so we're trespassing on their land. Which land? Any land. Earth belongs to the nations of the world (which is why they're called the nations of the world).

I don't belong to a State, anyone. I am a Jew!!!

So G'd starts the Torah not with the first commandment, because the commandments are all related to the physical world and we wouldn't have been able to understand. G'd first had to warn us by telling us that in the beginning He created Heaven and earth. Heaven is not any more a place for G'd than is earth; the Heaven also were created by G'd. Therefore, the part of G'd which is the soul of the Jew doesn't belong in Heaven any more than it belings on earth. 


The reason for the existence of Heaven is that it was a stepping stone toward the creation of the earth. The purpose of creation is to reveal G'dliness that is not immediately evident in the physical world, to bring that which is otherwise un-G'dly to G'dliness. How is this to be done? by having the Jewish soul come down into this worldd to engage in physical, wordly activity, but from a G-dly perspective, that is, through the mitzvahs of Torah. 


The Torah says that Jews are to be a light unto the nations of the world. This means that whereas the nature of the physical condition seems to imply that the world. created itself, and therefore has no allegiance to the Creator and is not indebted to a Creator, when we do mitzvahs in the physical world, using physical objects, we reveal a fundamental truth. The physical world is not something separate from G'd, but is G'd creation, created for a G'dly reason, which is to reveal the G'dliness that is concealed within the physical condition. 


Looking at a table tells us nothing about G'd. On the  contrary, it distracts us from G'd. It seems to be saying, "Look! I'm a table! Been here all along. I'm a reality unto myself." But by doing mitzvahs within the physical world, we make it a bit more transparent, like washing the dirt off of a dirty window so that we can see through it more clearly. We can see that physically is not  meant to block G'd out; on the contrary, it, the physical thing, can become and must become a window to G'd. 


This is what elevates the world and gives it a G-dly purpose. If we don't elevate the world, the world remains what it appears to be, which is a contradiction to G'd. 


A Jew is therefore a G'dly being sent to this world on a mission. So the Jew experiences a certain discontent, which is unique to Jews, and the essence of that discontent is: "Why am i here? What am i doing here?" Every human being asks himself this question, because every human being has a desire to accomplish something. For an intelligent person, life has to make sense and have a purpose. But with a Jew it's slightly different. Intelligent beings ask, "How do we make the most of this existence?" The Jewish condition is that inwardly, conciously or unconsciously, we not only want  to know how to make the best of life, but the don't understand why there's life at all. Everybody can ask this question is a philosophy class, but the Jew is truly bothered by it, bothered in his gut. What is this all about? Not, "How do i make the most of this life?" Not, "What am I supposed to do?" But, "Why life? Why existence at all?" 


And because we find it difficult to answer that question, we find a disproportionate number of Jews in the world who don't know what to do with themselves. It's not an exaggeration that although we are less than 2% of the general population in the US, at the same time we are over 40% of all the cults, of alll the searching, of all the revolutions and upheavals and changes that take place in the world. This is because we are not content; we sense that something to do with the very condition of existence needs to be explained, and we are not finding an explanation. So we're ready to turn everything upside down and throw everything away and start all over again in order to find the justification of existence. 

Shalom! Aleichem.

Cultural Support: Jacob Jr. Benleumi, Advisory, Consulting and Education. International Relations Analyst.

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