ב"ה
We don't like being told that a food palatable to our taste buds is unhealthy for our body. We don't like being told that something desirous to ourselves is hurtful to another person. We don't like being told what to do. We don't like restrictions on our life.
"Mishpatim" are laws which reason would have compelled man to devise even if they had not been divinely revealed. As our Sages say: "If the Torah had not been given, we would have learnt modesty from the cat and honesty from the ant." So why does G-d instruct Moses that these laws should be given lifneihem, interpreted by the Chassidic masters as "into their innermost self"? Surely it is not necessary to awaken the innermost reaches of the soul in order to obey the mishpatim, when reason is sufficient to compel adherence to them.
He was a noted scholar who had accomplished much in his years of Torah study. Now he had discovered in an obscure tome of Kabbalah that if a suitable person were to go forty days and forty nights without uttering a single unnecessary word, he would merit the exalted spiritual state of ruach hakodesh (divine inspiration).
There it was. The dreaded word of the intellectual world. Everyone literally gasped in horror. It meant you believed there might actually be something higher than the human mind, even higher than the mind of a professor. If I was a fundamentalist then I was an academic heretic.
I am stranded on an island with barely enough room to move about, with a breadfruit tree and a spring of fresh water, and nothing else except a 350-page spy-thriller. I read the mystery-thriller once. I read it again.
 For Mrs. Pearl Krasnjansky, co-director of Hawaii's successful Chabad-Lubavitch center, preparations for the long trip back east from Honolulu to the Conference of Lubavitch Women Emissaries in Crown Heights this week commenced several months ago... |
POSTCARD FROM HONOLULU
Exodus 21:1-24:18 Week of January 30 - February 5, 2000 The Parshah In A Nutshell Full Parshah Summary With Commentary
LINKS THE REBBE: 50 YEARS THE REBBETZIN PREVIOUS ISSUE
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