Sublime

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

I trust the unfolding and I will meet it well.

From earliest rabbinic times there were such institutions as the tamchui, or mobile kitchen, which distributed food daily to whoever applied,

Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg, all human beings are endowed with three “intrinsic dignities”: infinite worth, equality, and uniqueness.10

We are thus obligated to affirm our own worth.33 “Just as a person believes in God,” the Hasidic master Rabbi Zadok Ha-Kohen of Lublin (1823–1900) teaches, “one must also34 believe in oneself.”35 How we see ourselves profoundly shapes who and what we become.

The main goal of a Jew is to serve God with simplicity and without any sophistication (Likutey Moharan II, 19).

Hashem loves righteousness and justice, the objective of both being the bringing of balance to this world.

The sixth Rebbe deduced from this principle that Israel ben Eliezer (1698–1760), the Ba‘al Shem Ṭov, “master of a good name,” generally abbreviated as the Beshṭ, should be considered the “Moses of Ḥasidism” and Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the “Moses of Ḥabad.”

But Moshe had badly overestimated the organizational power of country Jewish rabbis, and most of the notices were lost in the ongoing rush of death notices, bar mitzvah commitments, once-in-a-lifetime sales, kosher cow-slaughtering requests, tallit-making services, business-dispute refereeing, mohel (circumcision) mix-ups, and marriage-arrangement