Religion plays a significant part in most people’s personal facets. Having practiced Judaism for all of my life, with my level of observance of God’s teachings in His Torah swinging back and forth several times in my 56 years, I have, since 1984 as our first of six children was born, been on a rising path of Torah observance. On October 20, 2015, I began an in-depth Torah learning program with the goal of achieving my first rabbinic ordination (smicha in Hebrew) by Rosh Hashanah in 2017. As my father Leo used to always quote my Grandma Rose, “It’s never too late to do good.”
I have absolutely no intention of using this platform to proselytize. Nor will I allow anyone else to do so in their comments – for any religion. I do not advocate Judaism for anyone who is not already Jewish. Nor do I require anyone who is Jewish to be more or less observant as I practice or any more or less observant than they want to be. I take all Jews as Jews regardless of their affiliations or lack thereof. And I take all people as people regardless of what religion they practice or not.
There are, however, fundamental precepts in God’s Torah, which have, over my 56 years as I write this post, become accepted by me as my Torah. And those precepts drive my actions in a real way. And so, I intend to explain many of them as I write in this blog about being Great! All the time!
If learning about these things bothers you in any way, then I am sorry. Don’t click the “Continue Reading” link below when you see a post heading down the Torah path. None of my blog is required reading for anyone who wants to find another way to their own greatness and none of it is more than suggested for anyone who wants to be, like me, Great! All the time!
But, I’ll tell you, a little Torah every now and then never hurts anybody.
Many guides to and commentaries on the Torah have been written since God dictated it to Moses around 1220 B.C.E. shortly after our exodus from Egypt. One that has been used extensively by Torah -observant Jews is the Shulchan Aruch, which was compiled in the mid-1500s by the great Sephardic Rabbi Joseph Karo, who provided a compilation of Sephardic laws and customs in a plain font, and Rabbi Moses Isserles of Poland, who is known acronymically as the Rama, provided the Ashkenazic perspective as his dissents and addenda in what is known as Rashi script. In 1864, Rabbi Shlomo Ganzfried compiled an abridgement of the Shulchan Aruch, known in Hebrew as the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, and in English as The Code of Jewish Law.
The Rama sets the tone for how people should behave in life as his first addenda to R’ Karo’s first statement in the Shulchan Aruch, which was repeated entirely by R’ Ganzfried in his Kitzur, which has been translated superbly by a team of scholars in the ArtScroll series of Jewish texts. Now that I have given everyone from God, to Moses, to the rabbis, to the present publisher, let’s look at the Jewish view on how people should behave.
“I have set Hashem (a Hebrew name for God that literally means ‘The Name’) before me constantly” (Tehillim, Psalms 16:8) is a fundamntal concept of the Torah and of the spiritual levels of the righteous who walk before God. For the manner in which a person sits, his movements, and his activities are not the same when he is alone at home as his manner of sitting, his movements, and his activities when he is in the presence of a great kind. Because then [when in the presence of a king], he certainly examines all his movements and speech so they should be properly refined. Certainly, when a person will take to heart that the Great King, the Holy One, Blessed is He, whose Glory fills the world is standing over him and observing his actions … one will be immediately overtaken by fear and submissiveness out of awe of Hashem, Blessed is His Name, and he will be [humbled and] bashful before Him.
Try though I might, I do not always live up to this standard of behavior. But I’m trying to do better each day.
Question: Do you? Are you?
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