"The meaning of the word blessing (Bera­chah) is to draw, to pull down, continue, or project Divine influence to oneself or wherever.

Every blessing has its own particular focus.

There is a blessing for bread and a different blessing for vegetables; they are not interchangeable.

There are also blessings for various mitzvot.

All blessings have a certain structure con­sisting of a fixed core, which addresses the Divine Presence, and then a diverse content defining the object to be blessed.

They all declare the same thing in many ways.

I express gratitude and bless my existence, my condition of the mo­ment, my food, or my performance of a mitzvah, and I adjust the contents of the blessing to suit the circumstance.

The core, 'Blessed Art Thou, 0 Lord,' is the essence of the blessing, its underlying message.

The point of a blessing seems, therefore, to be the declaration of a certain relation to God.

All the rest is detail relating to a specific situation.

The blessings are thus an extension of faith.

Their formu­lation seeks to direct the path of Divine projection from above to a congruent reality.

The opening words, 'Blessed Art Thou 0 Lord, our God, King of the Universe,' define a vertical line descending from the 'Thou' who has no name, who is beyond all titles, to the Lord God who is King of the Universe and integrally immanent in the perceptible world around us.

After this opening come the various particulars.

The blessing thus contains within itself all the elements of relationship with the Divine, expressing the inscrutable difference and closeness between the infinite reality, the transcendent 'Thou,' and the immanent King of the Uni­verse.

This relationship between the Divine 'Thou' and the King of the Universe is the essence of the tension (and power) that we put into the blessing."

–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

 From In the Beginning by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

"It has taken 3,000 years to teach the Jews to keep the Sabbath with joy, as 'Oneg Shabbat,' delight of the Sabbath.

To tell the people to refrain from doing any work on the seventh day did not require too much urging or educating, but to make the Sabbath day a sacrament and a joy is far more difficult.

It takes ages because most of what has been learned over a long period of time can be destroyed in a single generation, and a new start has to be made.

That this is still true today is evidenced by the behavior of certain hooligans in the religious quarter of Jerusalem who throw stones at other people who also do not have any idea of what the Sabbath means.

There seems to be a serious obstacle to a genuine accep­tance of the Sabbath.

The source of the difficulty may lie in the esoteric truth of the Sabbath, the fact that its light is a 'returning' light, as the ancient wisdom calls it.

The Sab­bath does not take part in creation.

During the week, one is active, doing things and working.

On the Sabbath every­thing is simply put back in place, returned to their source."

–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

  From In the  Beginning by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

"When a person does a mitzvah, he does not necessarily add anything to himself, but when a person studies Torah, he does acquire something.

Also when one prays one does not necessarily acquire anything.

On the contrary, it is said that a person should not even enjoy it.

If he gets pleasure out of prayer, out of seeing himself in the act of prayer, he should perhaps do something else.

A Tzadik once went to an extreme in this respect—saying that he preferred someone who said that he fasted from one Sabbath to the next to someone who actually fasted, because a person who claims to fast deceives only others whereas a person who actually fasts deceives himself.

So long as there is a feeling of triumph or satisfaction, the point is missed.

What should remain has to be more in the nature of burnt ashes, or, at the highest level, no residue at all.

The peak experience should be beyond all feeling, or the capacity to talk about it.

It is also maintained that the highest level of prayer cannot be visible from the outside.

When someone is visibly devout in prayer, the prayer is likely to fall short of the highest.

It was said of a certain Tzadik that when he prayed he looked like a burnt-out wick. 

He was nonexistent."

–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

From In the Beginning by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

"Some people live in their own narrow world and are stingy to themselves.

But they do so not out of miserliness, for there are people who can realize that other people are in need but fail to see that they themselves are  no less in need.

There is a story in the Midrash Rabbah about some scholars who came to a city to raise money for charity.

They sent one of their number to observe the household of a certain illustrious citizen in order to ascertain how much to ask of him.

The scholar came to the house and by chance over­heard the rich man scolding his wife, insisting that she buy a cheaper brand of lentils for their table.

The scholars therefore did not even bother to approach him for money but collected their charity from others.

When they were about to take their departure, the rich man complained to them, 'Why didn't you come to me?'

They explained the reason, and he answered, 'Concerning that which belongs to  me, I chose to be stingy, but about that which belongs to God I prefer to be generous.'"

 –Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

From In the Beginning by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

"It is told that the tzaddik Rabbi Uri of Starlisk (the Seraph) once said that if only his father would have immersed in a mikveh (ritual bath) once in his lifetime, Rabbi Uri's service of God would have been immeasurably easier.

No person—even the greatest tzaddik—can ever completely disassociate himself from the garments he inherited, and any deficiencies they contain will be a perpetual challenge to him.

Conversely, a person who merited to inherit a hallowed garment is thus empowered to achieve great heights in holiness, even if his own soul is of a lesser spiritual quality.

This concept is the basis for the importance traditionally accorded to yichus, 'ancestry and lineage.'

A soul is not inherited, but its gar­ments are.

These garments impart certain qualities to the soul, such as nobility, refinement, and talent.

This garment is passed on from parent to child even if the child is of an entirely different caliber.

A lofty garment can be bestowed upon the lowliest of the lowly, in which case, even if he chooses to descend to the depths of depravity, his holy garment will interfere with his lifestyle.

It is not that people of an exalted lineage sin less; it is that they cannot enjoy their sins as much as a sinner of lesser parentage.

Their lofty garments get in the way; their holy ancestry burdens them and robs them of their capacity to transgress with abandon.

There is no guarantee that a person of holy ancestry will be a great person, but somehow, something always remains.

If we study this phenomenon closely, we see that this is not only a matter of education but also of the personality that one is born with, a sort of brand burned into his soul.

Our generation abounds with such individuals—people whose soul's garment gives them no rest and does not allow them to sin easily or with pleasure, who are driven by mysterious internal forces, often against their conscious will.

Try as they may, they cannot shed the garment that garbs their soul by virtue of their lineage."

–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

From Opening the Tanya by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

"When a person makes use of the world, he takes responsibility for more than the end result, what he himself uses.

For instance, he is responsible for the entire system that has grown and prepared his food: for the people, the tools, the place, the sky, and the earth that toiled, prepared, and brought him that food.

The entire world is involved in such preparations.

Inanimate matter, plants, and animals all work to bring neutral reality, a point of decision.

A Jew stands at such a point and decides whether an object will be used for sanctity or not.

Will he raise it to holiness, so that the entire framework connected to his deed attains justification and meaning, back to its very inception, or will he contaminate that object with unworthy deeds or thoughts?

Depending on his decision, this entire portion of the world will be judged either positively or negatively—for success or for destruction.

If he chooses holiness, it will rise and be connected to sanctity.

If he does not, it will again wait, as it has done since its inception, until someone comes and rectifies it."

–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

From Understanding the Tanya by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

"After the death of the body, the soul returns and is reincarnated in the body of another person and again must try and complete what it failed to correct or what it injured in the past.

The sins of man are not eliminated so long as this soul does not complete that which it has to complete.

From which it may be seen that most souls are not new, they are not in the world for the first time.

Almost every person bears the legacy of previous existences.

Generally one does not obtain the previous self again, for the soul manifests itself in different circumstances and in different situations.

What is more, some souls are compounded of more than one single former person and share parts of a number of persons.

A great soul is most usually reincarnated not in one single body but branches out, participating in a number of people, each of whom have to satisfy different aspects of existence.

In spite of this incal­culable complexity, the soul will be made up of the same constituent elements and will have to com­plete those uncompleted tasks left over from the previous cycle.

Therefore the destiny of a person is connected not only with those things he himself creates and does, but also with what happens to the soul in its previous incarnations.

The encounters and events of life, its joys and sorrows, are influenced by one's previous existence.

One's ex­istence is a continuity, the sustaining of a certain fundamental essence.

And certain elements may rise to the surface which do not seem to belong to the present, which a person has to complete or fix or correct —a portion of the world it is his task to put right in order for him to raise his soul to its proper level."

–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

From The Thirteen Petalled Rose by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

"When a person is in a coma, we feel a deep sense of pity, not because that per­son is suffering, but because that condition is a degrada­tion of someone who once could act, and now cannot.

The spiritual degradation of working far below capacity should engender the same feeling of pity.

A human being has a huge spiritual potential.

When such a creature lives life at a much lower level, it is not sinful—it is just a pity."

–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

From Simple Words by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

"Being born is the shock of transfer to a set of circumstances in which almost everything is done in a different way, in which there is an order of a different kind.

Dying is doing the same thing—again, in a different way, perhaps coming to a point where I discard certain things about my being.

The shock there is clearly that of transferring from one set of circumstances to another.

Our notion of people going to hell has to do with this transfer.

I might be magnificently suited to survive in this world, but now I have to go into another world with other rules, whether I want to or not.

And the things that equipped me to be, for instance, a finan­cial success in this world will send me to hell in a different world!

If a person doesn't grow through adaptation to a certain order and then move into another one, he is unable to deal with it.

It is like the tad­pole and the frog.

We see this all the time: men who were wonderful as boys in schools are not necessarily wonderful as adults out of school.

Because a change creates a necessity for a different order."

–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

From The Strife of the Spirit by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

"Free will is an element of disorder.

It is also the only element of advancement.

Any kind of movement is a way of destroy­ing a system of order.

Walking, for example, is becoming unstable.

Run­ning is becoming even more unstable.

Flying in a plane creates a dif­ferent kind of instability; the plane becomes less and less stable until it takes off, and then it restabilizes and gains equilibrium.

Movement destroys equilibrium all the time.

The power to move is also the power to destroy order.

The imperfection is inherent, because we are the only creature that has independent volition, and the only creature in the universe that can distort.

These distortions are part of our common human work for coming to a higher point, because other creatures, seemingly, can­not move of their own volition, and we can.

And being able to move means that we can move in different directions.

We don't have the same biological point of view as other creatures.

We are free of instinct—not entirely, but to a very great degree.

That is our power, and that is our downfall."

–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

From The Strife of the Spirit by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

"The desire for explanations is a very understandable human need.

We want to hear the truth, and we want to understand why and for what purpose a certain thing happened.

However, we also have another, simultaneous wish: we expect this truth to be easily understood.

These two wishes are, in most cases, mutually exclusive.

Our as­sumptions about our ability to understand are often quite presumptuous.

Often, when we do get an explanation, we are unable to understand it.

Our thinking process is not only heavily biased by our wishes and inclinations, but is inherently limited.

A full reply may be unpleasant to hear, and generally, far above our ability to comprehend.

That does not mean, however, that we ought not to question.

The prophet Jeremiah (12:1) says, 'You are righteous, 0 Lord, and I cannot disagree with You, yet let me talk with You of Your judgments.'

In other words, God is, by definition, right, but we are entitled to dis­agree, and even to express our disagreement.

If we are hurt, and suffer, we have a perfect right to cry out.

In­deed, if we pretend that it does not hurt, then we are liars.

In fact, the oldest ritual of Jewish national life, which is a few thousand years old, is the Seder night—the first night of the Passover festival.

That ritual begins to­day, as it did long ago, with children asking questions.

If they cannot ask on their own, somebody is supposed to teach them how to ask questions.

We are instructed to start out with questions.

Asking questions is not only per­missible, it is encouraged."

 –Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

From Simple Words by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

"Caring for others is the problem of every great teacher, because when he gets in contact with other people, he is destroying his own balance.

You see, if you make a connection with someone else, then you become, at least for the time being, a unit with that person.

But this new unit is not balanced, and to try to balance this new unit requires a very different effort on the part of the per­son who is, by himself and on his own, a balanced person.

That is why so many people, including most of the prophets, did not want to be teachers—not because they were blemished, but because they did not want to destroy their balance.

The story of Moses and the Burning Bush, his repeated refusal to be the Redeemer, is not just caused by humility.

He is being asked to take an interest in other people, to be involved with people, some of whom are perhaps, so to say, nasty people.

And you cannot work with a person or speak with a person without having contact and having at least his image imprinted on you.

So there is a great sacrifice involved for the harmonious person to agree to be connected with others."

–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

  From The Strife of the Spirit by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

"There would seem to be an abyss stretching between God and the world—and not only the physical world of time, space, and grav­ity, but also the spiritual worlds, no matter how sublime, confined as each one is within the bound­aries of its own definition.

Creation itself becomes a divine paradox.

To bridge the abyss, the Infinite keeps creating the world.

His creation being not the act of forming something out of nothing but the act of revelation.

Creation is an emanation from the divine light.

Its secret is not the coming into exist­ence of something new but the transmutation of the divine reality into something defined and lim­ited—into a world.

This transmutation involves a process, or a mystery, of contraction.

God hides Himself, putting aside His essential infiniteness and withholding His endless light to the extent necessary in order that the world may exist.

Within the actual divine light nothing can main­tain its own existence.

The world becomes possible only through the special act of divine withdrawal or contraction.

Such divine non-being, or conceal­ment, is thus the elementary condition for the existence of that which is finite."

-Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

From The Thirteen Petalled Rose by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

"The Sabbath is not just another day of the week, nor even a special day; it sums up the week and gives meaning to it.

The weekdays are marked by the acts of Creation, ever repeated by the descent of the divine plenty into the world.

And parallel to this descent it is man's function during the week, in the order of things, to fix and to set the world right wherever it tends to go wrong.  

This includes correcting the world, in the physical sense, by work and action on the external frame and, in the spiritual sense, perfecting the world by performing mitzvot.

For in the realm of the human soul, man's work on himself, his constant correcting of faults and spurring to activity of his inner being, consti­tutes a ceaseless creative effort.

The Sabbath is essentially the day of rest, of cessation from all labor and creative effort.

And this holds true for the spiritual effort of working on oneself as well as for the physical effort of working on the world.

The week is characterized by busy­ness or activity, while the Sabbath is grounded on stillness, on the nullification of oneself in the downpour of holiness.

And this self-repudiation is expressed by a renunciation of all work, whether it be in the physical sense, as being busy in the world, or in the spiritual sense, as engaging in efforts to correct one's soul.

In fact, the very power to receive the spiritual essence of the Sabbath comes from one's readiness and ability to surren­der, to give up one's human and worldly state for the sake of the Supreme Holiness, through which all the worlds are raised to a higher level."

–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

  From The Thirteen Petalled Rose by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

"The great Hassidic Rebbe known as 'the Holy Jew' said that he owed his great achievements to a blacksmith.

In his youth, he lived next to a diligent blacksmith who would begin working very early every morning.

When the Holy Jew heard him work, he would say to himself, 'This man is just working for money; I am studying Torah, which is much higher and nobler. If he can deprive him­self of sleep, and rise to work so early, how can it be that I cannot get up at that time?'

He then began to rise for his study a little bit earlier.

The blacksmith heard the Holy Jew studying aloud, and he thought to himself, 'I work for my livelihood, but this young man does not earn any­thing for his studies. If he can rise this early, then I can rise even earlier.'

So he did.

The Holy Jew then started a little bit earlier, and they went on competing in this way for quite a while.

The Holy Jew then said that the compe­tition gained him so much time that he was able to achieve greatness.

In this competition, neither the Holy Jew nor the blacksmith lost anything.

Both only gained.

They used the spirit of envy to find a common measure—their use of time—and competed about using that time for doing the work they wanted to do.

This envy created a spirit of ri­valry, a desire for victory, the urge to be uppermost, and it spurred two people, in different walks of life and in differ­ent realms, into doing more—each in his own way."

–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

From Simple Words by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

"The practical mitzvot are not a device for attaining spirituality, love of God, and other spiritual aims.

In fact, the mitzvot have no purpose, material or spiritual, beyond the single aim of attachment to God.

And God is neither material nor spiritual but equally distant from both matter and spirit.

The question of whether a person believes in God or denies Him is not of any greater 'concern' to God than whether a person smokes on Shabbat.

Furthermore, as far as genuine attachment to God is concerned, it is the body that holds the greater potential for such attachment, because, among other things, the vast majority of the mitzvot are phys ical deeds.

The prevalent assumption that the spiritual is better suited to achieve attachment to God stems from the failure to distinguish between attachment and a feeling of attachment.

The two are not syn onymous; indeed, they can be far apart and at times even opposites.

Attachment is an objective truth: a person is one with God, and it makes no difference whether the person experiences an uplifting of the spirit at that time or not.

If the criterion is how one feels, if one's feelings determine what is good and what is bad, what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong, then this is not attachment to God but attachment to oneself!"

–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

From Opening the Tanya by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

"A cardinal principal in the service of God is that it must be done with joy.

It is said in the name of many Hasidic masters that there is something that is not listed in the Torah as a sin yet is worse than any sin and something that is technically not a mitzvah yet is greater than all mitzvot.

Nowhere does the Torah expressly forbid sadness and depression, yet this is the most virulent of sins, for it stifles the heart and mind, closing them to the service of God.

Joy is not an express mitzvah but is the greatest of mitzvot, for it opens a person's heart and mind, enabling him to perform all the mitzvot and to make a mitzvah of everything."

–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

From Opening the Tanya by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

“Just as the awareness of wrong becomes increasingly deep in Hell, the understanding and enjoyment of good grow constantly stronger in Paradise.

Unlike Hell, which is a limited, finite stage, because it has to correct and amend what happened in a finite span of life, the joys of Paradise are endless and everlasting.

To use a physical metaphor, the absolute zero of temperature is defined and closed.

But there is no upper limit to higher and higher temperatures.

The freed, cleansed soul is now able to have a touch of Godhead, which is the absolute infinity that contains the wholeness of everything.

While being connected and confined by the body and by the shadows of the world, the soul can hardly grasp it.

But in another stage of existence, when these boundaries are no longer there, the soul can keep ascending for eternity.”

–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

From Simple Words by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

“Although the patriarchs intuitively observed the entire Torah even before it was given, once it has been given, we must follow its directives rather than our intuitions, because the Torah has become the pattern of the rectified world.

It is the key, the map, in which reality appears as it should be, in which God Himself appears, without the constriction and the distortion of the created world.

As a rough analogy, a lock is built in such a pattern.

It contains a row of teeth that are out of alignment, that are purposely ‘distorted,’ as it were.

The key that opens the lock has a configuration that fits with teeth in the lock, making it possible to open the lock.

To a person who does not have the key, the door remains closed.

To a person who does have the key, the door is open.

The existence of this world is closed, and we cannot see the divine beyond it.

There is no direct connection between one level and the next leading directly to God.

But the commandments create a direct link between the created and its Creator, with a direct connection to the highest point, with no distortion.

In this sense, the performance of a commandment completes the wheel of creation.”

–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

From Learning from the Tanya by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

“A person involved in Torah and mitzvot in a sense organizes the world, transforming the chaotic universe into order.

By way of illustration, when randomly scattered metal filings are magnetized, they take on a specific, meaningful arrangement.

Our world may be said to be filled with noise.

A person involved in Torah and mitzvot collects snippets of information from that uproar and combines them so that he receives meaningful communication from God.

Thus, this noise, which normally doesn’t allow us to hear anything, is given shape and transformed into an instrument that transfers meaning.”

–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

From Understanding the Tanya by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

“Seen as separate and unrelated command­ments, each as an individual obligation and burden, the mitzvot seem to be a vast and even an absurd assortment of petty details which are, if not downright intimidating, then at least troublesome.

What we call details, however, are only parts of greater units which in turn combine in various ways into a single entity.

It is as though in exam ining the leaves and flowers of a tree, one were to be overwhelmed by the abundance, the variety, and the complexity of detail.

But when one realizes that it is all part of the same single growth, all part of the same branching out into manifold forms of the one tree, then the details would cease to be dis turbing and would be accepted as intrinsic to the wondrousness of the whole.

A basic idea underlying Jewish life is that there are no special frameworks for holiness.

“Belief in God can be naïve and childish, or sophisticat­ed and elaborate.

The images we have of God may be non­sensical, or well constructed philosophically.

Yet the essence of this belief, when stripped of verbiage and frills, is simply: existence makes some sense.

Sometimes, one may think—probably mistakenly—that one knows exactly what that sense is, while others may just ponder it.

In any case, there is a firm belief—which precedes any kind of thought, rational and irrational—that there is some sense in things.

What we experience, through our senses or in­wardly are only disjointed pieces.

The fact that we some­how connect these particles of information stems from our a priori faith that there is a connection—because it precedes reason.

Accepting this assumption is the first, most funda­mental ‘leap of faith’; not an experience, but a belief.

Of course, people would not call this ‘religious belief,’ nor see it as a point of faith.

Nevertheless, when analyzed properly, it becomes—for those people who are afraid of the word—frightfully close to believing in God.

This be­lief is like our belief in the existence of the world: it is the foundation of our relation to everything; indeed, on some levels, it is perhaps even more fundamental.

This deep, native belief can be found when we ‘undo’ our childhood training and eliminate everything we were taught about belief as children.

Then we must answer the question ‘What is God?’ not on a philosophical level that claims objective definitions, but as an attempt at least to under­stand ‘What is God for me?’

To do this, we have to get rid of our preconceived and learned structures and im­ages, which blur our real belief. We must delve very deeply into ourselves, into our most primal thinking, indeed—to begin at the beginning.”

–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

From Simple Words by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz