Gazing Skyward

A person has to always be mindful that there is a goal and purpose to life. We have to strive to stay true to our goal, and to stay away from all the distractions that this world is chock-full of. The Torah calls this world a passageway. People don’t waste a lot of time decorating a passageway, or fitting it out with all the latest luxuries. They know that the passageway is just leading them to the end point, the place which we should really all be focused on.

We all know that life is temporary, don’t we? We all know that as the Baal Shem Tov said, there is nothing more definite than death. And yet, our Evil Inclinations are so powerful that they can so easily make us forget that we’re just in transit, down in this world. There are cemeteries all round, and yet we all think death can’t possibly happen to us.

That’s the lie that the Evil Inclination tries to tell us all the time, so that we’ll forget about our eternal goal and the whole reason for being down here in the first place. That’s why the first thing a Jew should do when they wake up is to remember the World to Come.

When a person remembers their commitments, and all the things they have to get done that day, they will fly out of bed. When a person tells themselves they have no obligations to meet, nowhere pressing to go, nothing important to do, they will simply turn over, and go back to sleep.

One of the reasons that the Torah starts with the Hebrew letter bet, which spells out the world Bereishit (Genesis), is because bet has the numerical value of the number two. This is to hint to us that there are two worlds that are functioning on different but connected planes, at the same time. Most of what we see around us, and most of the interactions we experience in this lowly, physical world, are coming straight from the Evil Inclination, with the explicit goal of diverting us away from our true purpose.

If we really want to see what is going on in our lives, in this world, we have to keep taking the time to look up into Heaven, which is the world of truth. Only there, will we be able to see ourselves, and G-d, properly.

A very good way to do this is to do a spiritual accounting, or self-assessment, every single day, where we go through every aspect of our thought, speech, and action with a fine-tooth comb. These are the three areas where G-d is ‘shrinking’ Himself to interact with us, be with us, and to bring us closer to Him.

There I am, drinking a glass of milk, when G-d suddenly pops a thought in to my mind, and I wonder if I paid the money I owed the grocery store this month, where my wife buys a lot of the food we have in the house. I can dismiss the thought as a “random” occurrence, or I can take it seriously and investigate if G-d is telling me I’ve forgotten to pay off a debt that I should have taken care of already.

Another example: a colleague is telling me a story, a terrible story about a Jew who is desecrating Shabbat. As I’m listening, G-d is inviting me to make a choice. I can choose to look down on that Shabbat-desecrating Jew, and pat myself on the back for not driving my car, or cooking, or turning my lights on and off on Shabbat; or, I can ask myself: why is G-d arranging for me to hear this particular story? Is there something I’m doing, or not doing, in my own observance of Shabbat that He wants me to change, or improve?

The Baal Shem Tov explained that every single little thing that happens to us is a message from the Al-mighty, to keep us focused on our eternal mission in life. Every thought, word, and occurrence in my life is a Divinely-authored letter to me, about what I need to be addressing, or thinking about, or rectifying, in order to really succeed in my mission.

Like everything, the more we train ourselves to see things from the Divine perspective, the more we will actually be conscious of it. And the more we accustom ourselves to honing our spiritual instincts by keeping mitzvot, and developing our spiritual side, whether by putting on tefillin, moving to Israel, or doing a kind deed for a neighbor, the better our spiritual vision will get. Instead of blinking and squinting and straining, to try and catch sight of G-d’s presence in our lives far away in the distance, we’ll see Him in everything.  He’ll be right in our faces; unavoidable, and unmissable. His fingerprints will be on absolutely everything.