How we spend our time

Dear Friends -

Regards from Jerusalem!

As many of you know, I am here as part of a four year fellowship at the Shalom Hartman Institute, and I am so grateful for the opportunity to spend 10 days with colleagues and scholars looking deeply at questions of prayer, both from the perspective of the mind and the perspective of the heart.

One of the many beautiful texts I had a chance to look at this week comes from the Talmud Yerushalmi (Kiddushin 4:12), where we learn an interpretation of the verse, “And the Holy One commanded Adam, saying, ‘Of every tree in the garden you may eat freely.” The Talmud goes on to learn that "In the future, a person will be required to give an accounting for every opportunity that they had to enjoy the bounty of this world and yet refrained."

Indeed, there might be no more serious spiritual question than how we spend our most precious resource, our time. Do we enjoy the world’s bounty? Do we feed the hungry? Do we pursue only our left interest? Who we are is how we spend our time; I can only pray that we spend our time seeking aspects of divinity in the forest, in the streets and in our hearts.

With blessings,

Rabbi Brent