When Professor Barzilai visited us last month in order to share with us some of his thoughts regarding the Holocaust, he reminded us that prisoners who had a strong belief in God before the Holocaust, someone to love or to care for or a centre in their life, could better tolerate the terrible conditions in the concentration camps and had better possibilities of surviving.

What Professor Barzilai reminded us of is something that psychologists, counselors and physicians have started ultimately to understand: that what happens with our spirit has a strong influence on what happens with our minds and bodies. Hope, optimism, a strong belief in God and a reason to live can be half of the cure in many cases of cancer, heart diseases and other illnesses.

Before Psychology was a wide-spread science, before Sigmund Freud was born, before Medical Science discovered how to treat many of the diseases we know about today, Jews around the world visited their Rabbis in search of advise. "I feel sad and lonely", "I can’t become pregnant", "I can’t talk or breathe very well", these were some of many of the reasons people went to see their Rabbis.

In the book "Shvachei Habesht", the Baal Shem Tov is asked by one of the physicians: "How was it that you could bring a cure to the ill while I, having more experience and knowledge than you, couldn’t?" The Baal Shem Tov answered: "You talked to his body, I talked to his soul".

Soul and body are two parts of the human being that are impossible to separate. The body permits the soul to fulfill its mission on earth. However, the soul sustains the material body.

We can not choose our life. We couldn’t choose the circumstances in which we came to this world, and we don’t know what life has prepared for us. However, people who have a reason for living, people who are filled with love, compassion and graciousness of spirit, people who care about others, people who have ideals, faith and hope, people who have a centre in their life and feel God is with them; these people can more easily carry the burdens that life may have prepared for them.

The soul is the wings of our body. With our soul, our spirit, we can elevate ourselves, we can elevate our material life. We may not be able to change our entire life, but we can give meaning to it.

Tomorrow we’ll read in the Torah:

Moses descended from the mountain with the Tablets in his hands. The Tablets, filled with God’s spirit were light for Moses to carry, even though he was 80 years old, because he hoped that the people of Israel would receive the commandments with joy and happiness. However, when the people of Israel made the golden calf, and it was obvious that they didn’t deserve God’s gift, the Tablets lost their spirit and became too heavy to be carried, Moses couldn’t handle them and threw them from his hands.

The Tablets, when they have a reason to exist (the people of Israel) are light to carry. However, when they lose their essence, when they don’t have a reason to be, the stone dominates them and they become heavy, like life for those who have not a centre in their life and their problems conquer their spirit.

To prioritize the spirit over the problems in our lives, to discover God’s presence in our life, to jump into a life of Torah and Mitzvot is a big and difficult challenge. The people of Israel failed to do that in the desert like us, who also fail some times in our daily life. Nevertheless, there was a second opportunity with the second Tablets, and during Jewish history there have been many other opportunities. God doesn’t give up and tries us to encourage us to accept his presence in our life, I believe that it is also a lesson for us to not to give up, to try to ascend in our lives, to be more spiritual and also to be better persons.

It is not easy to do that. It may take an entire life, but that may be the reason we are on earth: to find a meaning behind the randomness, to hear an echo of God’s voice in the middle of the noise of our search.

And may God open our hearts to His presence, and may our souls be filled with His spirit.

Shabbat Shalom!