Welcome to Sunday School, the Sunday edition of Turn It, Turn It.
Below you will find a little love letter to the mezuzah. Prepare for pure, unadulterated, Jewish nerdery. And after that, please enjoy a study of the word olam, which is used in prayers so often, we rarely pause to consider what it means.
Shavuah tov (have a good week) and stay hydrated out there!
Love, Meg.
The Genius In The Mezuzah: When A Home Becomes A Prayer
You can think of the mezuzah as ancient interior design, or as a life hack, or however you want in contemporary language. There is no question that it is one of the most brilliant inventions in spiritual life. It is a prayer made physical, and then made into your actual home. To hang up a mezuzah means to live within a prayer. I’ll explain.
Inside of a mezuzah are a few paragraphs of the shema, which is to say, some sections of the Torah. The sections come from the book of Deuteronomy (6:4-9 and 11:13-21). You can see the entire text translated at Chabad.org, but this is my translation of the shema:
Listen, people of Israel, the Eternal source of life is our G‑d, the Eternal is One.
The shema is the central Jewish statement that there is one G-d. Creation is all connected. And then immediately after this, we are told in the next section, the v’ahavta, to love this source of creation with all our heart, soul, and might. Then, we must teach our children to love it, too, and remind ourselves through physical things like tefillin and the mezuzah.
The mezuzah is a reminder that just as one room is connected to another inside of a house, all parts of life – people, plants, pollinators, weather, tides, the moon, all of it, flows one into the other. When we love creation and care for it – when we love our neighbor – it ripples out. An act of love can be infinite. And what better place to cultivate a sense of love and connection than in our homes?
Hanging a mezuzah shows the world you are Jewish. But what the heck does that mean? It means walking through every doorway with love.
We recently hung a mezuzah in our new home and shared our hopes for our house. Colleen said she wanted the house to be a place of calm. I said I wanted it to be a place of laughter. We affixed the mezuzah, the ancient reminder to love, to our bedroom doorway. As we did that, our home became our prayer. We blessed it so it could bless us.
D’var Torah: Olam
In this series we look at Torah, one word at a time. D’var Torah means “word of Torah” and is what we call teachings or interpretations of a text. Here, we will take this phrase literally. Each word has a story.
Baruch atah Adonai, eloheinu melech haolam … even non-Jews know these epic six words. They begin so many blessings that I dare not count. This is what these words mean:
“Blessed are you, Adonai our G-d, king of the olam.” I grew up with that last word, olam, translated as “universe” but was spiritually sparked when I learned that olam has another dimension.
In our second favorite book, the BDB, we find olam entered under the entry for alam, a verb that itself has many definitions and uses. The first being “to conceal.”
Further down in the entry, we find this word defined as “world or creation”. But then...and this is the exciting part…a little further down, olam is defined as “long duration, antiquity, futurity.”
Huh. So, olam can mean not just the universe but infinity in time. In other words, “Blessed are you, Adonai our G-d, king (or, I often substitute ruach in here, which means spirit) of eternity.” Spirit of time. That constant container for life.
If this sounds like I’m heavily influenced by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, it’s because I am. We will end with a little of his wisdom:
“For where shall the likeness of God be found? There is no quality that space has in common with the essence of God. There is not enough freedom on the top of the mountain; there is not enough glory in the silence of the sea. Yet the likeness of God can be found in time, which is eternity in disguise” (Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath).
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