Jewish Life Digital Edition September 2015 | Page 74

SAVE THE DATE
Ronald Lauder
President of the World Jewish
Congress
Bernard-Henri Lévy
French intellectual, media
personality, author and activist.
SAJBD National Conference
22 November 2015

Wishing you Shana Tova and a
year ahead blessed with
meaning and knowledge

dividual person; some apply only to women, some apply only to men, some apply
only to Kohanim, some apply only to our
leaders (judges, kings, etc), some apply
only at certain times or only in certain
places. In other words, there is no one
person who is obligated in all of the Torah’s commandments. Moreover, G-d realised when he charged us with these
commandments that we would make mistakes, both unintentionally and even intentionally. And he included among these
613 commandments the commandment
to confess to Him when we do something
wrong, as well as the great gift of Yom
Kippur, an annual day specifically set
aside for atoning for where we’ve fallen
short each and every year.
On top of the bad rap that G-d and His
Torah get from non-Jews, we have also
suffered from the horrendous public relations job done by prior generations of
Jews; those who were fond of saying
things like, “It’s tough to be a Jew.”
Granted, there have been times when it
was more difficult for some to earn a living, but, make no mistake, to be a Jew
has always been a blessing – a blessing
that, like any blessing, comes with great
responsibilities and challenges.
The Jewish view of man’s physicality
and the physical world in which we live
also stands entirely at odds with almost
every other major religion. If you think
about it, most religions focus on transcendence from the physical world – either by focusing, for example, on such
things as meditation to help one tran-

scend all things physical, or by focusing
almost entirely on the value of the next
world – Christianity’s City of God. Most
sects of Christianity consider the physical
world and man’s physical body, as well as
his actions, to be completely corrupt and
without any possibility of redemption,
with only the spirit capable of any sanctification and salvation.
From a Torah perspective, man is obligated to elevate, to improve, and to strive
to perfect his physical nature and his
world. We believe that physical things –
places, objects, animals, and even human
beings – can actually be sanctified, made
holy. For the Jew, even the most physical
of activities, for example, those focused
on reproduction, and the most physical of
places, for example, the slaughterhouse,
can be elevated for a higher purpose. And
there are many such examples:
• We take wheat (or one of the other four
grains), grind it, add water to it, knead
it, and bake it into matzah, and with it
we can fulfil the Torah mitzvah of achilas matzah, eating matzah on the first
night of Pesach.
• We take the horn of a ram (or other
qualified kosher animal), hollow it out
and with it we can fulfil the Torah mitzvah of tekias shofar, sounding the shofar on Rosh Hashanah.
• We take a cow, slaughter it as we are
commanded, and from the skin, we can
make the parchment that will be used
to write Torah scrolls, tefillin and mezuzos, as well as make the boxes for the
tefillin themselves.

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