In 2010, HaRav Isaac Ginsburgh received an unusual birthday gift: a Twitter account. While many might not have expected a revered teacher of Torah to utilize such a platform, he embraced it, posting daily. Initially restricted to the medium's strict character limits—which permitted only two or three sentences at a time, these short, highly concentrated messages eventually required expansion and elaboration. To accommodate more substantial, detailed ideas, a blog account was opened for him. This digital teaching phase lasted for an entire year. Later, the staff at Gal Einai painstakingly compiled these exact tweets and blogs, organizing them by subject to create the book The Wondering Jew: Mystical Musings and Inspirational Insights.
For those familiar with HaRav Ginsburgh’s extensive teachings, his mastery of the Kabbalistic and Chasidic traditions is virtually unparalleled in this generation. Typically, when delivering discourses in Israel to audiences deeply versed in Torah, he transmits the most profound depths of esoteric thought. Yet The Wondering Jew reveals a distinctly different facet of his pedagogy. The teachings within that volume are characterized by a light touch, playful language, and good humor. Even when elucidating the most unfathomable spiritual concepts, he does so with an elegant simplicity. The language is tailored for a broader audience, demonstrating that the deepest truths can be made accessible to anyone.
This is the beginning of a series of short articles based on the entries in the book. Each short article begins with a quote from the Wondering Jew. Some of the quotes are shorter and some longer. The elucidation of the quote follows.
Love and Fear of God
There is nothing to fear except God. But why should we fear someone who is absolutely good? To truly fear God means to fear forgetting Him.
To understand this idea, one must delve into the nuances of the Hebrew language. The term Yirat Shamayim is commonly translated as “fear of Heaven,” but yirah also meaning “awe.” Normally, when we speak of fearing God, we mean that we are in awe of God, not in fear of God. What Rav Ginsburgh is saying here is that despite the normal understanding, there is in every profound love relationship, an inherent measure of fear, which manifests as the fear of doing something inappropriate that would upset one’s beloved and cause the relationship to weaken or even break. Thus, in this spiritual context, to truly fear God does not mean to be terrified of His punishment; it means to fear forgetting Him. To battle this fear, we seek to maintain a constant, unyielding awareness of God’s Presence in our lives.
This principle beautifully echoes a foundational narrative from the life of the Ba’al Shem Tov, the founder of the Chassidic movement. When he was just five years old, his father passed away. His father’s last will and testament to his young son consisted of two simple but profound instructions: “Just remember two things: do not fear anything or anyone except God and love every Jew.” These two principles shaped the Ba’al Shem Tov's entire life. He was completely fearless in initiating a revolutionary movement—Chasidut—which is fundamentally based on the word for loving-kindness, chesed. The ultimate teaching is that the only true fear one should harbor is the fear of being distant from God. This sort of “fear” is based on the love, reverence and awe one has for their beloved. Our most natural relationship with the Creator of all should be one of complete love and awe.
Amazingly, the two principles in the Ba’al Shem Tov’s father’s words are co-dependent. It is impossible to love every Jew if one fears losing anything but one’s connection with God. In fact, one will readily find upon simple reflection that all the baseless hatred (the lack of love) for other Jews is caused by allowing ourselves to be misaligned by fear of losing our connection with things other than God.
Falling in Love with God
If you're dreaming and want to wake up, fall backwards. (just to be on the safe side, make sure there's something soft behind you…)
Free falling in a dream is a good sign. Don't worry, you won't crash; you'll wake up first. God's hand is there to catch you. Fall into it.
Why do we say to “fall in love?” To experience true love, one must fall from the heights of one's ego. Egocentricity leaves no room for love.
The English verb to fall comes from the Hebrew verb nafal (נפל), 'to fall,' which bears the same meaning. In Hebrew, this word is cognate to the word for wonder (פלא). By witnessing wonders in nature and in our lives, we fall in love with our Creator.
To let someone else into your life requires profound selflessness; egocentricity precludes true connection. By witnessing the wonders in nature and falling away from our egocentricity, we literally fall in love with our Creator. This teaching perfectly encapsulates the wisdom of Maimonides (the Rambam) in the beginning of the Mishneh Torah: If one wishes to know about God, they must look at His creation. And when they look at His creation, they will inevitably come to love God.
Loving God with All One's Faculties
God-awareness finds its ultimate expression in the verse following the Shema: "And you shall love Havayah your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might."[1]
There are three levels of love: with your whole heart, with your whole soul, with your whole might. Loving with your heart means to love with both your inclinations: the good and the evil.
With All Your Heart
The Hebrew word for "your heart" (levavcha) is grammatically plural because the heart conceptually contains two ventricles, representing the good inclination and the evil inclination. We must learn to love God with both.
It also means to love with both sides of your heart: right and left. Today the right means conservative and the left means liberal. Conservative love is to love as my fathers did, my ancestors did, from tradition. From them I learned to love God because it is a mitzvah. Liberal love is spontaneous. It is love at first sight, because I love, not because I was told to. Love with all your heart.
Loving God with all one's heart requires integrating both the traditional, commanded love (the right) and the spontaneous, organic love (the left).
With All Your Soul
Loving with all your soul refers to situations that demand self-sacrifice. It means devoting your life to your beloved, so much so that you would donate your organs to save their life. By devoting your life to God, you save His life, as it were. God's life refers to the revelation of His presence on earth—His life among us. If God's Presence disappears, it is as though He has passed away. He depends on us to keep Him here with us in our consciousness.
While people are more familiar with the correct notion that the Infinite, Omnipotent God lacks nothing, needs nothing, and is entirely perfect, Chasidic thought stresses a profound intimacy between God and man. With this in mind, to view God solely as a transcendent entity devoid of need is to "sanitize" Him, creating a false separation. The Prophets and Sages clearly illustrate a God who cares deeply, who even cries over the destruction of the Temple. In Chasidic terminology, God possesses a fundamental desire to have a dwelling place in the lower worlds—“God craves having a dwelling place in the lower realms.” He depends on humanity to maintain His manifest Presence in the world through our selflessness and actions.
With all Your Might
Loving with all your might means to love with all your wealth, with all your resources you’ve acquired through life. The Sages explain that for some, it is harder to give up their wealth than their very lives. Rather die rich than live poor. Loving God with all your might reveals His very essence, not just His life-force. First you become nothing, empty. Then you become part of His absolute being.
To love means to give. We must be ready to give all we have—our hearts, soul, and might to our beloved. If we really love, it's easy."
A Numerical Gem
A beautiful numerical gem is found in the verse: “And you shall love Havayah, your God, with all your heart and with all your soul, and with all your might” (וְאָהַבְתָּ אֵת י־הוה אֱ־לֹהֶיךָ בְּכׇל לְבָבְךָ וּבְכׇל נַפְשְׁךָ וּבְכׇל מְאֹדֶךָ). Its complete value is 737, the same as the word shalhevet (שלהבת) “a flame.” This teaches us that true love of God should be experienced and expressed as a burning passion, an all-encompassing illuminated state of consciousness inspiring us to reach ever upward, like a dancing flame.
Aaron, the High Priest, was commanded to light the menorah in the Tabernacle. Regarding this commandment, Rashi comments that he should kindle the lights “until the flame (shalhevet) rises up on its own [power].” The simple meaning of this phrase is that Aharon is obligated to not only light the candles, but to make sure they will stay lit on their own. Spiritually this means that a superficial love of God based purely on a sense of obligation or duty will not be enough to keep one’s candle—i.e., one’s soul— lit, so to speak. Rather, one’s love of God must be carefully cultivated in a manner that assures it will be an intimate and passionate love that will stay lit through all the ups and downs of life. This can only occur through a fiery, deeply felt, and fervent love of God.
Closeness to God
Is it possible to measure how close you are to God?
The sign of having done a good deed is feeling close to God. Feeling far and estranged from God is the sign of having done something wrong.
The 11th of the 13 principles of faith written by Maimonides is faith in reward and punishment. There is the reward and punishment of the future in the World to Come, but there is also an immediate reward and punishment in this world: feeling close to the Almighty or feeling far and estranged from Him. There is no better feeling than the former, and no feeling worse than the latter.
If a person does a mitzvah, (a commandment of the Torah, a well-defined good deed) and still feels far from God, (the One who commanded us to do the mitzvah), it must be that either he performed the mitzvah by rote, as a matter of habit, or that some egocentric motive entered his consciousness while doing it.
Performing a mitzvah for its own sake, for the purpose of fulfilling God's will and completing one's mission in life, will always bring with it a sense of closeness to God.
Dangers of Spiritual Pride
A person must make an active effort to perform a mitzvah with real Kavanah—pure intent; it cannot simply be done by rote or routine. If a sense of estrangement follows a holy act, one must examine how the act was performed. There is an important teaching from the Ba’al Shem Tov on the insidious dangers of spiritual pride:
Sometimes you might experience a momentary high after performing a mitzvah but then comes a fallen spirit. The Ba’al Shem Tov, (the founder of Chasidut) explains that this is because the high was nothing but a sense of self-satisfaction, not true joy in having merited to do good in God's service.
The sense of self-gratification that comes almost automatically with the performance of a mitzvah is likened to the venom of a snake biting your heel. The heel symbolizes the end of the deed.
Echoes of the Garden
This imagery draws deeply upon the narrative of the Garden of Eden. After the snake convinced Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the resulting consequence for humanity was that the snake would “strike at their heel.” Symbolically, the heel, the lowest part or end of the body, represents the very end of a deed. When a person feels pride and self-gratification at the conclusion of a holy act, rather than acting purely in the service of God, it is like the venom of the snake biting their heel.
So, don't confuse the false impure sense of self-gratification with the true pure sense of feeling close to God. Closeness to God is gratifying, but it isn't about me being close to Him, it's about Him being close to me.
Humanity usually thinks entirely in the mode of "I want…” Even in the sense of “I want get close to God." While true, placing too much emphasis on one's own ego getting close to God actually prevents that very intimacy. True spiritual success is about acting in a way that allows God to feel close to us.
[1]. Deuteronomy 6:5.
