Sublime

we know what to do with space but do not know what to do about time, except to make it subservient to space.

To live the life of faith is to hear the silent cry of the afflicted, the lonely and marginal, the poor, the sick and the disempowered, and to respond. For the world is not yet mended, there is work still to do, and God has empowered us to do it – with him, for him and for his faith in us.

From time to time we need to step back from the noise and hubbub of the social world and create in our hearts the stillness of the desert where, within the silence, we can hear the kol demama daka, the still, small voice of God, telling us we are loved, we are heard, we are embraced by God’s everlasting arms, we are not alone.6 1.

As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel notes, “There is no craving for death in the history of Jewish piety…Earthly life, mortal life, is precisely the arena where the covenant between God and man must be fulfilled…Life here and now is the task.”

Thing is a category that lies heavy on our minds, tyrannizing all our thoughts.

This, then, is the answer to the problem of civilization: not to flee from the realm of space; to work with things of space but to be in love with eternity. Things are our tools; eternity, the Sabbath, is our mate. Israel is engaged to eternity.

One must sacrifice mitzvot for the sake of man rather than sacrifice man “for the sake of mitzvot.”