By the Grace of G-d
Dear Friend,
Last Friday night as I was thinking about the upcoming week, I realized that there was nothing extraordinary about it.
It was the first full week after the High Holidays/Sukkot without even a ‘minor’ special day like Rosh Chodesh or 7th of Marcheshvan.
Just an ordinary week.
There are not so many weeks that are that ordinary.
Extraordinarily ordinary.
Which lead me to an obvious conclusion. On week that is ordinary, one should focus on finding the specialty in the ordinary.
You see, we tend to pay attention to the extraordinary moments of our life.
The births, bris, baby namings, bar/bat mitzvah, engagement, wedding, milestone birthdays and anniversaries and perhaps even unexpected financial windfalls. Those are the events and moments that stick out.
Our calendar is dotted with memorable days that comes only once a year. Annual Festivals like Pesach, High Holiday, Purim Chanukah and a few more.
Those are highlight moments.
They are exhilarating and uplifting. They inspire us and gladden our hearts.
But are they truly the ‘nuts and bolts’ of life. In terms of quantity and duration of time, it is the mundane daily grind that takes up most of your living time. Those ‘regular’ hours that are sometimes monotonous and often boringly predictable. There is no away around it, as not exciting as they are, these are the ‘meat and potatoes’ of life that occupies most of our life here on earth.
Think of food types. Desserts, even G-d’s natural sweets, like succulent fruit, are sweet and enjoyable. But you can’t be eating goodies all the time. Good nutrition is made up of things that are duller and more dependable, like grains and proteins.
True, joyous lifecycle events are enjoyable and warm. Most of our lives though, we are living ‘life as usual’. Working not partying.
It would be sad if one resigned oneself to life those many days of ‘life as usual’ without joy and warmth. If one kept his or her exuberance only for entertaining guests and ‘highlight’ moments.
The goal of our Jewish Festivals is not just to elevate the actual days that they fall out on. Rather they are tasked with the mission to change the mundane days that follow them as well. Not just to be holy on Rosh Hashana. Rather we are to bring that holiness into the rest of the year that follows. Even into the 9-5 of our working environment.
To be happy on Sukkot and Simchat Torah is not something that ends once the Chag finishes. Rather we are to take that joy and infuse it into our observance of G-d’s commandments for the duration of the year.
Our feeling of passionate devotion to G-d at the climax of Yom Kippur should be injected into our entire being. Impacting us in such a way that whatever we do, we do as passionate children of G-d.
Much as a marriage anniversary celebration should not just be about the moments that are spent reliving the great gift of their marriage. Rather the couple ought to inject the relationship with a depth that remains activated and alive even on a rainy Wednesday morning when one of the spouses wakes up feeling grumpy.
An ordinary week bring with it extraordinary opportunity. It allows us to inject our ordinary life with the extraordinariness of G-d’s mission to us here on earth.
The mission is:
Bringing Heaven down to Earth.
Creating a place, a dwelling, for G-d, here in the lower spheres. Not in Heaven. Heaven already knows about G-d. Here on earth, we need to swamp the universe with the awareness of G-d.
This is not just about lifetime cycles or annual cycles. In a way, it’s a daily pattern. If you look at your daily schedule, you will find that there are highlight moments and inspirational components, and conversely there are dull and very ordinary moments.
We pray to G-d and study His Torah first thing in the morning. This is intended to create a focus and chart the path for the day. To bring holiness that can then be infused into the continuation of the day. When we are instructed by G-d to go out from our Synagogues and Houses of Study and go to work. To do mundane things.
What do I mean by mundane things? In the olden days it would mean going out to the field to plough, plant, and harvest. Today its more about bargaining, buying, haggling, selling. Or pushing buttons on a computer. Food industry. Medical industry or whatever other conduit G-d has provided as a means to pay your bills. As well as the things we need to keep our body and soul united and healthy. Like eating and drinking. Spending quality time with family and friends. These are not ‘holy’ engagements perse like praying or studying Torah.
It is precisely during these ‘earthly’ experiences that we need to make sure we are ‘heavenly’ oriented. We do this by remembering the ‘why’ of our existence. We eat, because we need to have healthy bodies to carry out G-d’s mission here on earth. We work so that we can do the mitzvah of supporting our families and of giving Tzedaka and helping others. And so on.
In this way, the ordinary is transformed into extraordinary. The mundane is transformed to being a conduit of holiness. It is almost like we have an opportunity to be an ‘alchemist’. To transform the ‘lower spheres’ into a vehicle for hosting the ‘upper spheres’.
That’s called transforming the ‘ordinary’ into the ‘extraordinary’.
Those were my thoughts about this week, before the week started. That I was looking at a very ‘ordinary’ week. Perhaps even a bit dull.
However, G-d had other plans.
Immediately after Shabbat I got the horrendous news that a young person had passed away tragically, and we needed to repatriate them to their home community for Jewish burial.
On Sunday I had a trip to Phuket to meet M, an old friend and an avid supporter of our work.
It was an extraordinary meeting on many levels. It seemed as an afterthought. As we were finishing our meeting, M told me that he has a lifechanging piece of advice for me. ‘Reach out to people who have Bitcoin to support your work’ he told me. Interesting. I had not ever paid much attention to the cryptocurrency topic, but apparently it has turned into something quite profitable for those who had it from the beginning. M said that there are people out there who have the ability to give Tzedaka from their bitcoin accounts. I followed M’s instruction and opened an account for receiving bitcoin donations. Click here.
On Tuesday night I got an emergency call from a distraught NY mother who had a son backpacking in our part of the world and was very concerned about pains he had in his abdomen. During these Covid times it was not simple to find the nearest person on the ground. Through our regional Chabad network, thank G-d we located the closest contact and was able to reassure the mother that her son would be looked after. Thank G-d it turned out to be a false alarm and was a temporary gastro ailment.
On Wednesday O, an expat who has lived here for quite some while, asked if he could come over to have coffee with me and chat. (BTW feel free to reach out to schedule a time for coffee if you would like to catch up with me, I will try my best to accommodate please G-d). I was schmoozing with O and mentioned that my friend M suggested that I take bitcoin seriously. Would you believe it? O started to tell me that he had invested in the cryptocurrency platforms way back. Seems like he knows the field very well. I hadn’t heard of crypto till recently and in one week, twice.
During the week I got a WhatsApp from a dear friend who has relocated to the States due to Covid and was apprehensive about the move at first. It turns out that the move has done absolute wonders for his families deepening connection with Torah learning and Jewish observance. I was overcome with joy for this friend and for the progress he was making in his life.
I had some deep and meaningful conversations with some peers this week. In each of those conversations I got to see the hand of Divine Providence in the most obvious way. I was majorly uplifted by these Providential events.
Oh, at the beginning of the week, I went to sleep a bit grumpy one night. Something was bothering me. The next morning, I woke up and felt like a new person. The bothersome thing hadn’t gone away, but it now excited me rather than bothered me.
A while later, after prayers, I opened my ‘mobile data’ and allowed my WhatsApp and email in. I was delighted to find a new picture in my inbox. The picture is from two days before Yom Kippur in 1988. It is a picture of the Rebbe giving me honey cake (Lekach) and wishing me a sweet year (link to picture). I had never seen the picture before, it was recently uploaded in the Jewish Educational Media’s website as they digitalize their vast amount of still pictures.
I now understood the spiritual energy behind my uplifted mood. When the Rebbe, a Tzaddik, gives you sweet honey cake, it is not just for then, it is a gift for life. A gift that comes with a responsibility. To share that sweetness and holiness with others. When the picture was sent to me by my brother who discovered it, my spiritual subconscious, my soul, must have felt it. When your soul feels the sweetness of the Rebbe handing you sweet spiritual energy, you cannot be anything but an inspired joyous servant of G-d.
There is more to be said about my ‘ordinary’ week. But I will stop here.
Have I made my point?
Ordinary is not so ordinary.
Even when it is ordinary, we must remember that our mission is to inject the mundane with holiness.
G-d takes us ordinary people and empowers us to the extraordinary.
To bring Heaven down to Earth.
The full culmination of the wedding of Heaven and Earth will be the coming of Mashiach.
May it be speedily. AMEN
Shabbat Shalom
Rabbi Yosef Kantor