Shavuot 5782 Survivor Season 613: Sinai Wilderness with Rabbi Eliot Baskin

 Shavuot 5782

Survivor Season 613:

Sinai Wilderness

with Rabbi Eliot J Baskin

 

Learning blessing:

Baruch atah, Adonai Eloheinu, Melech haolam, asher kid’shanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu la’asoak b’divrei Torah.

Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Sovereign of all, who hallows us with mitzvot, commanding us to soak up words of Torah.

W5  Five Ws of journalism: Who, What, Where, When and Why?              

Text 1

Rabbi Oshaya Rabbah  said: The Torah says, "I was the artisan's tool for the Holy One, Blessed be."

As a rule, an earthly monarch who is building a palace does not build it according to his own ideas but according to an architect; and the architect does not know how to build it out of his head but has parchments or tablets to know how to design the rooms and openings. In this way, God looked into the Torah and created the world. 

B'reishit Rabbah 1:1

Text 2

After creating the earth, the Holy One said to it, "If Israel accepts the Torah, you shall survive, but if not, I will return you to chaos."

Tanchuma Genesis, Shabbat 88a

Text 3

Once the world was created, it could not have been sustained had it not occurred to the Divine Will to create human beings to engage in the study of Torah. For just as God looked into the Torah and created the world, humans look into it and sustain the world.  

Zohar 161 a-b

 

Text 4

Why was the Torah given in the wilderness? To teach that if you do not set yourself free like the wilderness, you do not merit the Torah. And just as wilderness has no end, so Torah is without end.

P'sikta D'Rav Kahana

Invocation for State Senate Feb 17th, 2022 President's Day

Seventy-Third General Assembly     STATE OF  COLORADO Second Regula

As our 2022 Legislature meets during this month of important birthdays: Frederick Douglass, the noted abolitionist who celebrated it after being freed on Valentine's Day, President Abraham Lincoln whose birthday was last week, President George Washington next week and, (shameless plug) yours truly on the 20th, grant, O God, that you Senators and staff be imbued with the spirit of mission, purpose and vision of our great American leaders.

 

During this time of pandemic anxiety and disenfranchised grief may we heed the words of  (Narrative of the Life of Frederick) Douglass who wrote in his autobiography, "...in the darkest hours of my career in slavery, this living word of faith and spirit of hope departed not from me, but remained like ministering angels to cheer me through the gloom.”

 

Let gloom and sadness give way to joy and happiness as Washington noted that

“Human happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.”

May you heed the moral duty to help the widow, the poor, the orphan, and the strangers in our midst.

 

And finally,  Lincoln said, “When I do good, I feel good.”  May you all feel good after a session of doing good for all the people of our state.

 

May the Source of Wisdom, Chonein haDaat, continue to shower birthday blessings to all of you who legislate here in Colorado with inspiration, integrity and insight!