Sublime

“If you sit in darkness long enough, you get used to it. You do not realize the need for light.”

This prayer-poem makes explicit that the ultimate aim of Shabbos is to refine and ennoble our inner dispositions, our orientation to the world, to other human beings, to God, and to ourselves.

So much of leading well is feeling supported by the congregation,

The Nasi of the Sanhedrin must by nature incline toward the middle path – neither overly sensitive nor heartless, neither arrogant nor self-deprecating, neither despotic nor soft, neither frail nor wild. He must possess only two qualities in an extreme form – wisdom and appeal.

The problem is that the rabbis he respects were almost all murdered.

A medieval sage, Rabbi Asher ben Yehiel (Rosh, 1250?–1327), insists that this mitzvah of receiving people warmly applies not just to one-on-one encounters but also to the way we carry ourselves in public. “Let not your face be angry toward passersby,” he says, “but receive them with a friendly countenance.”48 How we comport ourselves in the world m

putting the focus on sound rather than sight.