Rosh Hashanah: The fixing of the Tree of Knowledge
My sweetest friends: You can live a beautiful life, do everything right, end up in paradise, but one thing that is missing, life never touched you.
There is a story of the Alter Rebbe. Once he laughed in the middle of prayers and afterward told the Hassidim that he couldn’t help stop laughing. He went up to Paradise and there he saw a man sitting next to our Father Abraham, bored stiff. He did everything right but he did it without heart. So he is sitting in paradise but doesn’t feel anything. It is possible to do teshuva all year long without touching the depths of ones own soul. Yes, but not on Rosh Hashanah.
The teshuva of Rosh Hashanah is crying from the deepest depths of one’s soul, because the shofar is the voice of the deepest deepest depths of our soul and humanly speaking, of G-d’s Soul. Everybody knows Rosh Hashanah is the fixing of the Tree of Knowledge which Adam and Eve ate on Rosh Hashanah, the sixth day of creation. The Tree of Knowledge has two shortcomings:
- 1) My whole operation is from my head. I know there is right, so I do it, or I am not doing it because I know it is wrong.2) Even if I am doing it right, it is dead, meaningless.
Once, when I was a young man, still in yeshiva, learning 48 hours a day, I met on the train a so called “playboy”. I was sixteen at the time. He was twenty-four years old. We talked to each other and he told me that his whole life consisted of wine and women. I asked him, “What do you think of yourself before you go to sleep?” He answered, “I hate myself and I swear tomorrow I shall not do it again, but I lack the strength.” Deeply impressed by his confession, I told him,” Do you know the way I live? When I go to sleep I swear to G-d and to myself that I do the same thing again tomorrow. Obviously you live in hell and I live in heaven.”
On Rosh Hashanah a great miracle happens. G-d takes us out from the cycle of death; the cycle of not having the strength to change what we do wrong nor having the guts to do what is right with all of our hearts. When we blow shofar G-d takes our souls, cleanses them like from before we were born, gives them back to us free from our past and with so much G-dliness and holiness that we feel everything and let everything touch us. The last rehearsal before blowing the shofar is the blessing we give one other Rosh Hashanah night. The more we bless each other with all our heart, which is how much soul G-d breathes back into us the next day. I bless you with everything.
From the Holy City, Brother Shlomo
Reprinted from Kehilat Jacob News Yerushalayim, Elul 5747.
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