Let My People Know

Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz: “Bank account and mortgage payments.”

Proverbially, a human life in this world lasts seventy years.

As the verse states, “The days of our lives in it are seventy years” (Ps. 90:10).

When a person dies and his soul is separated from his body, it no longer worries about the affairs that bothered it so much in this life, such as his bank account and mortgage payments.

It is, however, very much concerned about its connection to God.

In this sense, when a person performs a mitzva, prays, or learns Torah, he is in the world of souls, in his own Garden of Eden.

At that time, he leaves his ordinary reality of the life of the body and the physical world, which usually seem so important and urgent, and moves instead into a realm where the soul is paramount and where he is close to and united with God.

Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz