Sublime

There is a meaning in the words ‘individual will’, and the transformation of man is toward his individuality. Man as a ‘being who can do’ can play a very important role in the cosmos. Gurdjieff says that such relatively liberated beings are necessary because they are able to help the Creator in the governing of the ‘expanding world’. Thus it is pro

For Shimen, the “community” is a set of concentric circles beginning with his (dead) family, extending to Gerer Hasidim, and extending further to others committed to the Jewish way of life; the farther out the circle, the less weight it earns in Shimen’s calculus.

In such durations and sizes, the only effective system of human relation and expression (constrained by our scientific knowledge) is the five M’s: math, meditation, metaphor, music, and myth.

Jews in the academies of Eretz Yisrael and Babylonia (where Jews had lived since the destruction of the First Temple and exile of 586 BCE) studied the Mishnah in depth, exploring its implications, debating the logic of its rulings, telling their own stories, providing anecdotal illustrations of principles articulated, and more. Over the next few ce

In the first instance, the dispersion of Moses in every generation (itpashṭuta de-moshe be-khol dara we-dara) signifies the capability of every Jew to expand his or her consciousness (da‘at) to the point of being assimilated within the divine and to draw down the infinite light into the world.42 However, the righteous sages, the “eyes of the congre

exponents of Lubavitch lore—in line with other Ḥasidic masters who trace their way of thinking to the Beshṭ—have repeatedly stressed that all of reality is infused with divine light, and that the telos of human existence, which is fulfilled most perfectly in the rituals of the Jewish people, is to liberate these holy sparks from their encasement in