Buy a Ticket
Life in so many ways is like buying winning a lottery. The odds are totally against winning if you don’t buy a ticket… L
How Not to Win the Lottery of Life?
There are two reasons why most people did not win the big lottery. The first is that the odds were one in about 80 million. The second reason is even better; we did not buy a ticket.
These two points will help us answer a gnawing question related to this week’s Parsha which is about all the Holy Days that the Jewish people were commanded to celebrate. The Shabbos and all the other Festivals are described as Kodeshholy or Mikra’ei kodesh “invitations to holiness.” The meaning of a Holy Day is that there is a definite aura of sanctity that permeates the day.
Yet, there are so many of us who have never felt any holiness during these Holy days. What is it that denies us the opportunity to appreciate the true feelings of these Holy Days?
As with the lottery, there are two factors that are responsible for our lack of feeling:
Firstly, the odds are stacked against us. We are so enmeshed in materialism throughout the week, that there is a natural barrier to our soul’s ability to sense anything spiritual during Shabbos or a Holiday. Just as there exists a statistical barrier to our ability to win the lottery, there is likewise a natural impediment for materialists to sense spirituality.
But, there is also a second reason. Many of us have simply not invested the one dollar to purchase the lottery ticket! We haven’t invested the time and effort in the observance of all the laws that pertain to the Shabbos and the Festivals.
When a Jew rests on the Shabbos and Festivals, recites the Kiddush, eats special meals and participates in all the Divinely ordained rituals associated with that Festival, that is his/her ticket that affords him/her the opportunity to “win the lottery.”
This phenomenon of not feeling the holiness of the Shabbos, is analogous to a person who does not know that his heart is beating because s/he never paid any attention to it. All the other sounds, feelings and sensitivities distract a person from feeling his own heartbeat. All we have to do is put our finger on our pulse, and remove all the distractions and then we will feel the rhythm of our heart.
The Heartbeat of the Jewish Soul
Shabbos is the heartbeat of a Jewish soul. To feel it, all we need is to not be distracted by weekday activity (rest) and to put our finger on our pulse, i.e., perform the Shabbos activities that were designed by the Torah for the Shabbos: light the Shabbos candles, recite the Kiddush over a cup of wine, eat Shabbos meals, recite the Shabbos prayers and hymns, study Torah etc.
Similarly, to sense the holiness that is present in the air on a Holiday, we must divest ourselves from all our weekday involvements, which are the natural barriers to spirituality, and tune in to the spiritual frequencies of the Holiday by doing the Mitzvos such as eating Matzah on Passover etc.
The Breakdown of the Analogy
There is one major difference between the winning of the lottery and being a winner of a Shabbos and Holiday experience. There is no technique developed that can get around the statistical barrier to winning the lottery. And not everyone can be a winner.
By contrast, every Jew has the capacity to rise above the natural barriers to holiness by recognizing that we are essentially above nature; that the natural order of the weekday is the anomaly for us and not the spiritual order of the Shabbos and Festival. They represent our true nature.
“How Pleasant is Our Lot.”
In our daily prayers we express our gratitude to G-d by saying “How pleasant is our lot.” This is an expression of how every Jew is grateful for winning the lottery that really counts.
And if we don’t feel this way now, our Sages have promised us that the investments that we make now by way of our observance of Torah and Mitzvos, will yield a definite reward in the Messianic Age, at which time we will all be the winner of the Divine and ultimate lottery. Do you have your ticket?
From the book Light from the Future: Parshas Emor by Rabbi Heschel Greenberg, published by the Jewish Discovery Center.
