There is a concept in Judaism that is very unique. The concept is that Hashem is not physical and is not subject to time. These two things are basic to the Jewish cosmology.
As Hashem is not a material being He can sit right next to you without being seen. He can be with you on a boat, in a car, or on an airplane. He can be with you and be with someone else. He can be with every person on the planet no matter where on Earth they exist.
He’s not restricted in any way. He can be with every person in existence simultaneously because He’s not subject to time. Simultaneous is a description of time. For Him the past, present, and future are Now. Man exists in time. Hashem does not.
Once a Jew understands this concept a Jew’s relationship with Hashem becomes much more intimate. You don’t pray to an image of something or someone. You pray to the source of all things. You understand that Hashem is right there with you and you look across at your neighbor and know that He’s with him as well.
When Hashem becomes your teammate it’s very hard to do an indiscretion because He’s right there. But man has free will to do it anyway and fortunately for Man Hashem is very forgiving. And that’s the reason for penitence. It’s the get out of jail free card. However, Hashem does have His limits!
For the reason of doing good, Jews have awakened in the morning for 3,000 years with the goal of bringing Heaven down to Earth, to make the material world a better place. That might be as simple as picking up litter or as complex as organizing a charity. They have used the 10 Commandments as their guide and the Torah as their light. This goal has brought tremendous scientific and technological innovation into the world by Jews who win Nobel Prizes at an unusual rate compared to other peoples.
Jews have been tortured, murdered, and expelled yet they still wake up every day with the thought of bringing Heaven down to Earth. It’s a very altruistic goal. I don’t know of any other people who, as a group, have consistently held this goal. Once you understand this you will feel a great pride in the fact that you were born a Jew. Born as a Jew you won the lottery!
Whether you add your own personal spice to the cultural mix is up to you. You still remain a Jew. You can accept Jesus as your Messiah but you are still a Jew, most of whom believe the Messiah has yet to come.
You can become a major supplier of pornography but you are still a Jew with the spark within to bring Heaven down to Earth even if you are presently failing in that task. Remember, Hashem doesn’t operate within a time frame. He’s right there with you even though you don’t see Him, but, again, He does have His limits.
So, if you are living a life bringing indiscretion after indiscretion into the world, don’t be surprised if something awful befalls you. Something awful might befall one of your offspring. If you constantly bring rot into the world, rot is where you will end up.
Another concept particular to the Jewish cosmology is the idea of turning curses into blessings. There are many, many stories within the Jewish tradition whereby curses are turned into blessings. The one about Balaam comes to mind. He was hired by a King to curse the Jews but Hashem turned it around into a blessing. It carries over into our personal lives.
Viewing a bad thing that happens in your life as an opportunity to gain a blessing is an unusual way of dealing with it and changes the whole aura around the negative event. Succeeding actions in relation to the event can bring good into the world. Let me give you a few examples.
At a dog park that I frequent there is a beautiful gazebo where people congregate to get relief from the sun. It’s held up by six white wooden posts. One day a short piece of Sharpie graffiti appeared on one of the posts. It was a political hate statement. It made sitting under the gazebo less inviting as a bad vibe often does. Then day after day more hate was written on other posts. It was disgusting. Hate speech is hate and the author was obviously enraged.
So, I bought some graffiti spray remover and scrubbed them all away. Many people noticed and were grateful. It wasn’t a matter of political content right or left, it was a matter of exposure to hate. The graffiti writer was a hate filled person. He is free to be hate filled and I’m free to wash it away so that others are not exposed to it.
Some people in our society feel that every and any public space is good for political activism. Ballgames, entertainment award shows, music concerts, college open spaces, toll bridges are just a few examples. The angry people imposing themselves on others only shows how self-engrossed they are, as they impose their rage on others. What they don’t realize is that no matter how right they are in their message, many people don’t want to join a group that is so self-centered and in the end their message achieves the opposite of gaining converts.
I’m sure the graffiti writer felt he was making the world a better place by messing up the white posts, hoping he would sway the crowd with his great intelligence but the Torah doesn’t say that spewing hate is the way to bring Heaven down to Earth. Cleaning hate away does bring the world closer to heaven.
After I cleaned up, every time the hateful person wrote something again, again I cleaned it up. Soon he realized that his comments were not gaining traction and he did it with less frequency. Defacing public property is a crime so every time he spewed hate he had to be alone in order not to get caught. As I kept cleaning it up It became harder and harder for him to accomplish his curse. When no one was washing it away he could do it once and it would be there forever. Keeping the posts clean is not a crime so I did my task in full view of everyone.
It became apparent to me that his hateful curses GAVE ME the OPPORTUNITY to gain blessings with a $9 graffiti spray and paper towel.
Here’s another curse to blessing example. I’ve had high blood pressure for about 8 years that has been resistant to most all medications. Recently I was in the emergency room running 250/125 for over 8 hours. It was an awful experience as the nursing staff was waiting for either my heart to stop or for me to stroke out. Ultimately a cocktail of 5 medications has brought my blood pressure down to areas of normal I’ve never seen. The curse of explosive and dangerous high blood pressure eventually brought the blessing of a new successful treatment.
And here’s another example. A friend of mine told me he was about to try a new cancer treatment. He was viewing it like “I hope it works.” When I told him to see the cancer curse as a potential blessing his view changed. Instead of hoping to take the treatment and get back to normal, he now had a more positive view that something bad might really be something good in disguise. The new treatment might make him better than he has ever been before. It changed his whole “feng shui” around the situation.
With every motion of the day, to bring heaven down to Earth is the goal of the Jewish people. Whether you pray 3 times per day or not, wear tzitzit or not, observe the Sabbath or not, this attitude makes you a Jew.
If you encounter a person who is anti-religion try not to spend a lot of time within his orbit. Anti-religious people are doing nothing to bring Heaven down to Earth. Generally, they are negative and angry, usually not without good cause but do you really want to hang out with this kind of vibe? They have forgotten their Creator so they just exist on Earth hoping to gain physical pleasure. Is that why the Creator made the human being?
The opposite of forgetting the Creator is remembering the Creator and living to make the world like heaven. Most religious people believe that is possible if only within their own household. And this is why religious communities pop up all around the world. They create areas of like-minded people who they can trust to be doing their best to honor their religions, remembering the one who created everything.
It doesn’t matter to me what religion a person lives, it’s better than no religion. Consider the Amish communities of Pennsylvania, the Chabad communities of Brooklyn, the Mormon communities of Utah. They may not be crime free but there is much less crime, much less depression, and much less loneliness in all these communities then in the general, no religion, communities of the world.
The diversity of these no-religion communities might be a great benefit to a well-rounded culture but you never know who might be coming from behind you with a knife. The gains of diversity are offset by the loss of security. Better to be with those who share your morals and values than to exist in a world next to many who care nothing of morals and values.
As Dennis Prager says, “There is no one on death row who attended church on the Sunday before their crime (unless it was to kill parishioners during Sunday services!).
Recently I’ve heard on many occasions when a tragedy occurs, “we don’t need your thoughts and prayers.” People who say that are expressing antagonism to God as if, “if there was a God this tragedy would not have happened in the first place.” That suggests their belief that existence here on Earth is a Garden of Eden. It’s not. God once made a Garden of Eden for humans and humans did not obey God’s laws so out of the garden we were banished. And this out-of-the-garden existence continues even today.
This doesn’t mean God no longer exists. He absolutely, without a doubt, does exist. Man creates the tragedies, not God. At these tragic times Man definitely needs a connection to God, so to advise the opposite is heretical and therefore unsupportive. People have the freedom to be a heretic, and you have the freedom to move away from an anti-religious person.
Are YOU an anti-religious person? What good it that? If you are it is time to change. What do you expect to gain by bashing the religious? How does hate make you a better person? Is hate part of bringing heaven down to Earth? We both know the answer to that is “no.” So, crumple up your hate and throw it in the garbage. Become a Jew. Wake up in the morning and ask yourself how you can bring heaven down to Earth. The Torah will tell you how and the Sabbath will give you the energy to do it.
Shalom
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