Demanding more.

I will give an answer from the realm of physics. Once, when I was a nice, honest young man, I was interested in that field. There is something in physics - you have a certain amount of pressure on something, and there is a point at which it can take no more. When you put then times, on hundred times taht pressure on it, something happens. The molecules collapse, and the very nature of the object changes.

In astronomy, you have what is called "white dwarves." These are small stars, the size of the earth, sometimes even smaller. The mass they contain is many times that of the sun. Each cubic centimeter weighs many tons. Why? Because the matter collapsed and became something else; the laws themselves changed.

The Jewish approach to life considers the man who has stopped going - he who has a feeling of completion, of peace, of a great light from above that has brought him to rest - to be someone who has lost his way...

He whose search has reached a certain level feels that he is in the palace of the King. He goes from room to room, from hall to hall, seeking Him out. However, the king's palace is an endless series of worlds, and as a man proceeds in his search from room to room, he holds only the end of the string. It is, nevertheless, a continuous going, a going after G-d, a going to G-d, day after day, year after year.

~The Thirteen Petalled Rose

marja wanna

"The issue is who is the master and who is the slave. If you are the master, fine. If you are the slave, then you are in trouble no matter what you're the slave of, whether it be coffee, exercise, or Torah study.

So you have to ask yourself, 'Who is the master and who is the slave?' "

familiali ties

Evidently, the ordinary definitions of a religion or a nation do not fit the Jews. Nevertheless, when the Jews are seen as an enlarged family or clan, their essence and way of life become aspects of the relationship of Jews as individuals to their family. The religion and faith are part of the rational and emotional tie between "children" and their father. The patterns of behavior and of life are the family way of the ancestors, and the national connection is only an extension of this family bond. It is a family that grew over the generations until it became a nation and yet remained in essence a family.

This is perhaps the unique quality of the Jewish connection. Sociologically, the family is the elemental unit of humanity. It is in many ways the most primal and primitive of social bonds, in contrast to national loyalty and belonging to a religious community, relatively modern and sophisticated connections. National, cultural, and religious ties are rational and conscious.

Family ties, however, are obscure and profound and far more difficult to articulate. But it is this very depth of experience that may have secured Jewish existence. It may be seen as a primitive and emotionally charged quality in the human soul, and not to be explained. It is, nevertheless, inexorably real and enduring.
~We Jews by Adin Steinsaltz

Imitative S h a d o w s

Jerusalem...where the reality of the everyday brushes against the eternal without our being able to separate them.
~We Jews, Author's Introduction

The notion that the Jew has stolen the national self, the "I" of a host people. It is as though the shadow not only imitates the movements of the master; he does is so well that the master begins to feel that he himself is becoming a shadow. Ironically, he becomes the shadow of a figure that is only an imitation of him.