NOTHING IS OURS
May 13, 2012
The founder of The Kabbalah Centre, Rav Ashlag, explains in his introduction to Ten Luminous Emanations, “Nothing in this world is really ours. Even if we work for something, what we receive as a result is not really a possession… We should see everything in this world as if it came from heaven.”
It’s a powerful concept, isn’t it? Nothing we receive in the world, nothing we are born with for that matter, really belongs to us. We are merely a receiver for all we are...
LASTING HAPPINESS
May 6, 2012
What makes someone happy?
Most of us think that those who can get what they want in life are happy – and from this belief we conclude that people with power or money or influence must be living the high life! Yet if we look more closely, we can see that often that the wealthiest people can be lost, bitter, and unfulfilled.
This is an indication of how superficial our perspective on happiness really is. Just because a person has lots of physical things does not mean he...
CREATING REAL FRIENDSHIPS
April 29, 2012
There is a famous story about a student who asked a great kabbalist if he could teach him the all the lessons of the Bible while standing on one leg. He replied that he could certainly do so, and then he spoke the following words: “Love your neighbor as yourself. The rest is commentary.”
Love does not happen easily—not even among friends or in a close-knit family. If our brothers and sisters or our parents weren’t family, would we still love them? Many people, if they were...
REMAIN GRATEFUL
April 22, 2012 (All day)
In 1970, Joni Mitchell, in one of my favorite songs, so poetically wrote, “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?” She’s right. Sadly it is sometimes only when people exit our lives that we see them for who they really were and what they had to give us. This is true not just of people, but of so many things. How many of us pray for health only when it is jeopardized or for financial sustenance only when our bank accounts...
LISTEN
April 15, 2012
Most of us were fortunate enough to be blessed with the ability to hear, but how much do we really listen? You’d be surprised how often we’re given solutions to our problems, but we’re so busy talking, we can’t stop to hear them. How often do we find ourselves thinking more about what we’re going to say next than hearing what another person is telling us?
More often than not, words go in one ear and out the other.
The importance of listening to others is something that...
