For the Lord thy God walketh in the midst of thy camp.
(Deuteronomy 23:15)
Seeing God walking in the midst of our daily life is the overriding theme of this entire Torah Tweets blogart project.
We repeat here the introductory comments at the top of this
blog that emphasize the centrality of down-to-earth spirituality in Judaism.
Talmudic scholar Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik in his book Halakhic
Man teaches that Judaism does not direct its gaze upward but downward:
It does not aspire to a heavenly transcendence, nor does
it seek to soar upon the wings of some abstract, mysterious spirituality. It
fixes its gaze upon concrete, empirical reality permeating every nook and
cranny of life. The shook, the street, the factory, the house, the mall, the
banquet hall, all constitute the backdrop of religious life.
The Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem M. Schneerson, teaches that
it is not enough for the Jew to rest content with his own spiritual ascent:
He must strive to draw spirituality down into the world
and into every part of it from the world of his work to his social life. His
work and social life should not only not distract him from his pursuit of G-d,
but they must become a full part of it.
American writer E. L. Doctorow in his novel City of God
expresses the same thoughts poetically:
If there is a religious agency in our lives, it has to
appear in the manner of our times. Not from on high, but a revelation that
hides itself in our culture. It will be ground-level, on the street, it'll be
coming down the avenue in the traffic, hard to tell apart from anything else.
Zionist Rabbi Abraham Y. Kook sees individual actions
combine as a symphony of Jews living together as a sovereign nation in their
own land:
The first message that Moses chose to teach the Jewish
people as they were about to enter the Land of Israel was to fuse heaven to
earth. To enable the mundane to rise up and touch the Divine, the spiritual to
vitalize the physical, not only as individuals but as a nation.
