Throughout Jewish history, we’ve been called the People of the Book, a people dedicated to understanding the manifold elements of Torah and applying it to our daily lives. Yet, a cursory survey of the Jewish landscape—in Israel and the Diaspora—reveals something dark and disturbing: Judaism, either as an assimilated people or as an extreme fundamentalist religion, with little in between. Consequently, Judaism lived globally and lived fervently with an ethos of compassion may be withering before our eyes. How do we stave off this creeping sickness within our midst?
What if we ensured the mitzvot, sacred commandments, radically transformed us? If they were not irrelevant from our lives or performed by rote but were vehicles for transcendence? What if Jews went beyond the mere letters on the page and reached for the loftiest ideals of the Heavens? We have so little time in our lives to actualize our unique potential to give back, yet we are often reduced to living within a rat race. The Torah is a dynamic song, yet most of us are reduced to understanding its majesty through rote exactitude. To go beyond the letter of the law and living the spirit of the law allows the Jewish people to thrive for millennia, forevermore.
