Portion of the Week; Bereshit 42-4, Rabbi Chiel

it's been bird age is all too although i'm only eighteen days casale in the days off it's illegal the bible was read in the synagogue with rabbinic commentary this evening we're rabbi samuels feel spiritual leader of the conservative congregation all the malvern jewish center in malvern long island my dear friends do you remember of a fascinating scene that is depicted in the third chapter of genesis of how i am saying first god places adam and even the beautiful garden of eden and tells adam that he may eat

the fruit of every tree of the garden except for one but three of the knowledge of good and evil then the snake tem steve to taste of the fruit of history and after she does she wants adam to share in her guilt she gets him to eat as well the numbers tells us the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the lord god amongst the trees or the garden the rabbis and the midrash have an interesting discussion on this point according to one legend allen was so tall that he reached into the very heavens themselves and therefore the rabbis asked how could possibly have attempted to high and answer by saying to go morocco more so after his same atoms shrank and became very small in stature

and therefore he was able to try to hide in the garden i don't think the rabbis wanted us to take this discussion to literally i doubt that they really believe that adam was like an ancient skyscraper or that he really physically shrank after his stand i think they were using this legend is a kind of a parable to teach man a great moral they were saying that a person's real height is not measured in physical feet and inches but rather as a determined by his actions by his deeds in the beginning tower physically and spiritually walking peace with the world and his maker but in a moment of weakness he succumbed slowly but surely his stature began to shrink and he

wanted to sink into the very earth itself before gods you like your frozen what are the things we do that make us sri lankans spiritual stature i believe they can be summarized in this fashion i think we begin to shrink spiritually as we stop growing in the matters of the spirit in the first place we shrink in stature when our intellectual growth ceases we're the kind of people who aren't interested in the vital issues of the world it as we look at our newspapers we only look at the advertisements or the baseball news on the stock market reports without reading the news of the world a columnist the editorials all of the very heart and the meat of what is important in a newspaper and we are not growing in intellectual awareness

if you're the kind of people who never read a book or if we do it is at best a popular bestselling novel but never the kind of book which challenges us with its ideas with his philosophy with its difficulty and we are not growing intellectually if we spend endless hours glued to our televisions sets watching giveaway shows and quinn shows and murder mysteries you may be sure that we're not growing intellectually but as the years go by and we never stretch our minds with a new idea we will find that we are ever diminishing in intellectual stature and in our intellectual capacities secondly i would say that we trained in stature when our emotional growth ceases if we find that we are so involved with our own feelings and our own needs

but we have little strength left to consider the feelings and needs of our families we have stopped growing emotionally more than that i would say that if we can only feel concern for our own family but not for our neighbor and not for our community then we have stop growing emotionally to i would go a step further i would say that if we are so limited by our concern for our immediate environment that we cannot be concerned with the problems of men everywhere our emotional gross has really been stunted i know a woman who represents an extreme example of this kind of emotional fixation

it woman who all unfortunately never had any children and who never gave herself the opportunity to grow emotionally by involving herself in the manifold worthwhile endeavors but banking to each one of us that are available to every person at first this woman has to be concerned about her husband as well as herself but as time has passed she has become increasingly more involved with her own fears her own paints her own imaginings she leaves her house less and less each day she speaks to fewer and fewer people she is constantly growing in word shrinking from the world recently her husband was

seriously ill which he seldom visited him while he was in the hospital the reasons that she gave were that she might catch a cold she hadn't slept a wink the night before she hates hospitals it's unfortunate woman has become so so shrunken and so fixated in her emotional growth that she has virtually destroyed any communication between herself and the world so dear friends if you want to know what it is that the germans your stature first job to find out what you are still growing intellectually they really ought to check to see what you're still

growing emotionally finally you want to look very carefully and see whether you are growing religiously or whether you have ceased to grow in this respect if your understanding of god is the same today as it was twenty years ago and i would say that you've stopped growing religiously because i believe very firmly but only if a person dance questions proteins and seeks to understand god ever more profoundly only then will this person's understanding of god ever make sure the person who is content to assert that he believes in god without struggling with the problem of

reconciling god with the evil in the world that problem that the entire book of job is concerned with if a person hasn't worried about that problem and he's not growing religious loophole is your knowledge of the bible is the same as it was twenty years ago and your understanding of the words of the bible are as you mature as they were when you were back in sunday school and i assure you you have stopped growing religious way because only if a man reads the bible in the light of his increasing experience in the light of his sometimes great suffering in the light of his ever increasing majority only then will human being ever fully grass the significance of the greatest gifts

that god has given command my dear friends james and he died at the youthful age of forty six but of this creative and fruitful writer someone recently had this to say they said he was still growing when he died how do you measure a person's stature not in feet and inches but by this measurement ask yourself each day the question are you still growing are you throwing intellectually emotionally and religiously if you are you may be

surging that your spiritual stature would increase each day of your life on them you have been listening to portion of the week the bible as read in the synagogue with preventing commentary this evening you heard read by samuel feel spiritual leader of the conservative congregation of the malvern jewish center in malvern long island the counter for a portion of the week is eliza combine of the congregation that's a long kings bay in brooklyn huling is basra it in the days on the it's the wrong why is also wow are you murph knowledge of all the nannies bomb murder omar al ali in mayor off that buzz aldrin a pall

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