A man walked to the top of a hill to talk to God.
The man asked, "God, what's a million years to you?"
And God said, "A minute."
Then the man asked:
"Well, what's a million dollars to you?"
And God said: "A penny"
Then the man asked:
"God.....can I have a penny?"
And God said:
"Sure.....in a minute."
One of my favorite teachings from Alan Morrinis, the founder and director of the Mussar Institiute, is that human beings must strive for distance between thought and action. Or as one of my meditation teachers (and probably a shrink or two over the years) has reminded me, “Just because you’re thinking it doesn’t make it true. Wait a minute, give it your attention, and then let go. More than likely, it’ll waft away. Last Shabbat, my brother, Ryan, reminded us of the work of Victor Frankl, who taught, that between stimulus and response lies a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose a response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness.
Shabbat is what I call that space. All week long, we are recipients of tremendous amounts of stimuli ever calling for our affinity and loyalty. Our minds and hearts wish to respond but our souls know better. However, six days a week, our souls often get short shrift. But on Shabbat, we put our souls front and center, allowing our minds and hearts to take the back seat.
Join us tomorrow night “in the back seat” (front row is good too!) for a very special Shabbat celebration led by me and my good friend, Rabbi Neal Katz. As the old SNL skit goes, “We’ll laugh, we’ll cry, it’ll be better than Cats.”
