Turning Inspiration Into Action
by Rabbi Simon Jacobson, Meaningful Life Center.
If you want the inspiration of the High Holiday season not to dissipate but to be turned into eternal moments that you can draw on for the rest of the year and for the rest of your life, you have to do something about it.
While meditation can be very beneficial, action is more powerful than any meditation can be. Indeed, meditation only lays the groundwork for action. Action changes human beings, moves mountains, and ultimately changes the world.
How can action change the world? It melts the tension between matter and spirit, fusing them into one.
Matter (our material, earthly realm) is temporary but tangible. Spirit (our soul) is eternal but intangible. Hence the tension between them. The Jewish solution is to fuse the two—to spiritualize the material.
To do so, you must take your material life, which is the antithesis of anything eternal, and you must connect it to something eternal. That’s the key.
Many people interpret this to mean that they should free up more moments in their life for eternal and spiritual activity—that, for example, instead of working fourteen hours a day, they should come home earlier and spend more time with the family.
That is very good but there is another way.
When you go to work you should transform your workplace into eternity. One suggestion, especially if your work is about making money, is to put a charity box on your desk. While it might seem like a token gesture, it becomes a constant reminder in the midst of financial deal-making that other things are more important.
Another suggestion—since so much attention is paid to food consumption—is to take the time to always make a blessing before and after eating. While it might seem like another token gesture, a blessing is a powerful reminder that the material world is not here for us to indulge in, but to be refined and transformed.
Ask yourself: How do you plan to capture the inspiration of the High Holidays? How can you turn it into action?
Exercise for the day:
- Commit to one action that will fuse the material with the spiritual in your life.
- Do it.
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