You can’t live without forgiveness. It’s like the two prisoners of war that meet several years later; and one said to the other: “Have you for-given your captors yet?” “No, I never will.” “Well then, they still have you in prison don’t they?”

We all know how our body feels when we get angry. The reason is because we keep rethinking the same thought, and that re-stimulates that emotional circle; and we rerun the angry thought over and over, and thus we hook right back into that hostility.

People can stay angry for days, weeks and years just because they are choosing to rerun the angry thoughts over and over again.

Joy is a complex emotion. Do you really feel joy?

Joy is to rejoice, to be glad. It is a state of happiness. Joy is bliss, delight, pleasure. It is gaiety, merriment, cheerfulness. Do we really feel joy?

I always wondered whatever happens to a child? It is born with joy. It expresses delight. It giggles with pleasure. It shivers with gladness.

What, then, brings the sadness to the eyes, the emptiness to the heart, the unhappiness to the mind? Why does the candle of joy burn dimmer as the child grows older?

In Judaism the word sin means missing the mark. The great theologian, Augustine, had a beautiful formula. He said: “We sin when we have our loves out of order”.

What he meant by that is that we all love a lot of things. We love family. We love money. We love a little affection, status, truth, etc. And we all know that some loves are higher than others or should be.

We know that our love of family is higher than our love of money. If we spend all our time to get money, we are putting our loves out of order.

So, for example, if a friend tells you a secret and you blab it at a dinner party, you are putting your love of popularity above your love of friendship. And we all know that is the wrong order!

My suggestion: Sit down and say: “What do I love? What are the things I really love; and in what order do I love them? Am I spending time on my highest love? Or am I spending time on a lower love?

Religion and spirituality are two different things. Spirituality is the poetry of the soul. Religion is the prose.

You can be spiritual without being religious; and you can be religious without being spiritual. It is almost like the difference between love and marriage. Love is an emotion. Marriage is an institution. They are linked, but they are NOT the same.

Religion has its shared routine – the daily prayers and the regular rituals. Spirituality is the emotional poetry of life.

Majorities may rule, but they do not judge. This is each person’s task, and bigness has nothing to do with it.

Consider for a moment: Commerce is concerned with profit. Nations are concerned with security. Nature is concerned with survival. Only human beings are concerned with moral values, with ethics, with ideals.

Because this is true – and it is true – our task is clear enough. First, we must know what is ours and ours only. We and we alone hold the key to life. Without each of us, all is a jungle. All is darkness. We must be prepared to speak out and defend what it is we truly are, and what it is we truly represent upon this earth.

More important by far than the words we speak, or preach, or write is the life we choose to live.

There will always be things that science cannot explain – the beauty of Mozart, the power of a Shakespearean sonnet, the tenderness between mother and child, the feeling we have when someone recognizes us and smiles. They can never be captured in the language of cause and effect or stimulus and response. Rather, it is in the mystery and majesty of the personal that God lives

God is dispensable only if humanity is. Think about the following: God’s hand may be a human hand, if you reach out in loving kindness. God’s voice may be your voice, if you but speak with kindness and the truth.

So, where does God live? Answer: God lives where we let Him in.

Let me give you an example. In the Bible, God commands Moses to build a tabernacle; and God said: “I will dwell in them” not “I will dwell in it.” I.e. God lives not in the building but in the builders, not in holy places but in holy lives and deeds.

In Western religions God cannot be seen. God is beyond the universe; God is not visible. Making a visual representation of God in Judaism is the paradigm case of idolatry. We do not see God; we hear Him.

Yet many of us make judgments of character on the basis of physical appearance, and appearances mislead. We also have a tendency to notice facts that confirm our pre-existing attitudes, and disregard those that challenge or disconfirm them.

Many people who are optimists and pessimists, believers and atheists tend to find that what happens, or what is discovered, proves that they were right all along. We select the evidence that supports our prior convictions. We see what we expect to see.

I recently read an article where the author said that if I ever said NO to something, people were going to think I wasn’t nice. I was selfish. “Why wouldn’t she do that for me?” and then I stopped listening to that little voice in my head that was trying to convince me of what other people thought; and I began to listen to who I really was, telling me what I really wanted. Before you agree to do anything that might add any stress to your life, give yourself time to let the answer resound within you. When the intention is right, the answer will be yes.

With warmth and affection,
Rabbi Sally Olins DD