This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

Joy is any feeling fully felt,

through speech that we make the inner, outer; that we bring the metaphysical into the physical; that we make real the purely intellectual. It is through speech that action begins.

At the moment of death, the Torah suggests, we finally stop denying death, and when this happens, we also stop denying life. We finally see our lives for what they really are.

moving from the body to the heart,

Many of us would rather try to keep our lives unexpressed, in potential, because we believe that if we don’t express our lives, we can hold on to them.

Can we go on being a doctor if we don’t have the same passion for healing we used to have? Can we continue to be a rabbi if all our theological assumptions have changed?

The rebbe became accustomed to constantly beginning anew.

You don’t feel your life—your life is dead to you—because you aren’t in it. If you want it to come alive again—if you want it to bristle with wonder and intensity—then you have to inhabit it, that dead, meaningless life that troubles you so. So inhabit your life. Be present in it, and watch the gray concrete turn a brilliant emerald green.

yashav, meaning to sit, or to dwell or to inhabit.