Wednesday, November 13, 2019

Synagogue Reading: The Sabbath, #2

Synagogue Reading:  The Sabbath, by Abraham Joshual Heschel
All this Jewish year, Rabbi Benson will read and discuss with congregants The Sabbath by A. J. Heschel following minchah services every Saturday.  For those unable to make it then, the rabbi's weekly article will be a brief summary of the pages we covered.  To order the book for yourself, buy it in our gift shop, or else click this link - PURCHASE THE SABBATH

Prologue, Pages 5-6:  "We must not forget that it is not a thing that lends significance to a moment; it is a moment that lends significance to things."  In these pages, Heschel continues to lay out the two worlds in which humans operate, space and time. 

Neither space nor time is "bad" in Heschel's thinking.  But when we think of reality as only be the world of space, then "reality to us is thinghood" and "the result of our thinginess is our blindness to all reality that fails to identify itself as a thing."  Stop and think about whether or not this is true in the way you live. 

Those things that are often most important to us are not "things" in the sense we can touch or see or smell them.  It is true about love, about happiness or contentment, or even something like family.  Yet our lives are often built around the tangible things of the world, even other people, who we all to often interact with as "things" and nothing more.  When we do this, Heschel is saying, we are missing out on an important dimension to our relationships and an important dimension to reality itself. 

We are ready, at the bottom of page seven where left off, to begin a new topic in the book, the way the Bible thinks of time and space.  Join us this Saturday following kiddush (about 12:30pm) for minchah and our study session.

Rabbi Benson

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