m014 011 Kislev 29 ~ Teves 3
View in blog: ChabadMed.com/TanyaBlog
Questions for today:
How would I feel if a dear friend or relative decided the meaningfulness of my hug based on the brand of my coat?
When I measure my time used to connect to the Creator, do I ask how deeply the Creator is imbued in the embrace, or how “spiritual” I measure the effort?
What would I do to earn the portion of Heaven of history's greatest personalities? – what if I can have it in my hands now?
Study today’s Tanya in full:
https://www.chabadmed.com/dailystudy/tanya.asp?tdate=12/7/2021
See today’s video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvN_JB61V4k&list=PLFZQPK6u-zSBls9Hwx3P5vKI_BRnjBvHe&index=11
Tanya Thought for Today:
A company in Japan recently invented a pillow that has an extension coming out that feels like an arm, so that when you are sleeping alone it feels like someone is embracing you.
This company is confused. It isn’t the ‘arm’ that gives the love, it’s the love that extends the arm.
When you embrace somebody while wearing ten pieces of clothing, you are not any farther from embracing them - it's what's inside that counts.
Yesterday when we learned that the most intimate depth of the Creator is found when you find the part that that Creator extended Himself the most to create. It is in tiny, finite things where you find the Essence of the Creator
This means that when the ‘clothing’ of our soul; our thought, speech, and action, engrosses itself in tiny finite things – for example, on Chanukah, our thought is thinking praise and thanks to the Creator for the miracles, our mouth is saying finite words to say praise of the Creator, and our hands are lighting a tiny little flame - the clothing of our soul is engrossed completely and embraced in the essence of the Creator.
Additional thoughts:
To get an idea just how precious and meaningful our physical commandments are, we look at the Mishnah, Ethics of our Fathers, 4:17.
“one moment of repentance and good deeds in this (physical) world is more beautiful than all of the world to come”.
In the (spiritual) world to come souls truly perceive the meaning and divinity of the Torah that they studied while in this world.
However, no matter how divine an experience that is, the soul perceiving it is still grasping a defined ‘concept’.
This has no comparison to a person in the physical world, embracing the Creator’s very Self, through the physical act of a mitzvah.