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Home > Daily Emunah Podcast - Daily Emunah By Rabbi David Ashear > The Real Cause
Podcast: Daily Emunah Podcast - Daily Emunah By Rabbi David Ashear
Episode:

The Real Cause
Category: Religion & Spirituality
Duration: 00:00:00
Publish Date: 2020-01-07 07:00:00
Description: We say in the Amida , “אתה קדוש ושמך קדוש” – we declare that Hashem is kadosh (holy). The Chatam Sofer asked, how do we understand the kedusha of Hashem? We know Rashi explains kedusha to mean פרישות or הבדלה – to abstain or to separate. When we separate ourselves from the physical and become more attached to spiritual, we are called kadosh. But how does that apply to Hashem? The Chatam Sofer explained: Hashem’s kedusha is evident when He humbles Himself, kavayachol, and separates from His holy abode and involves Himself in our physical world. “המשפילי לראות בשמים ובארץ“– He lowers Himself and involves himself in the tiniest parts of creation. He’s involved in feeding the smallest insects. He’s providing clothing for the needy. He makes Himself a shadchan and sets up couples in marriage. And this is what it means when we say, “ואתה קדוש יושב תהילות ישראל.” Hashem is called a Kadosh and that He is down here with us, listening to our prayers and praises. When a Jew is in a business meeting and asks Hashem for help with the sale, or if a woman is making dinner and asks Hashem to make the food taste good for her family, that is where we see Hashem’s kedusha . He’s involved in our worldly matters. This is why, before we begin the part of the Amida when we ask for our needs, we first declare אתה קדוש-You are holy. We are saying, “Hashem, we know You separate Yourself from the Upper Worlds to be with us, and that’s why we are going to make all of these requests of You.” It’s Hashem’s greatest pleasure to be actively involved with our seemingly mundane and trivial needs. He created the whole world just to bestow His kindness upon us, to take care of us and give us our needs and enable us to earn an eternal life of bliss. In the Birkot Hashachar, first we thank Hashem for giving us life, then we thank Him for wisdom and for eyesight. The brain and the eye are from the most complex creations in the entire universe. After that, we thank Hashem for giving us shoes, something seemingly very insignificant, something we could technically live without. How could we group these thank you’s together? L’havdil, it would be like a person grouping together thanking someone for saving his life and also for lending him a dollar. One answer is that, to Hashem, there is no difference in effort between giving us life and giving us shoes. Hashem is interested in every single one of our needs and we should feel that He could take care of even the biggest ones effortlessly. He could heal someone from a sickness that the doctors have no cure for in the same way He heals a little cut on a finger. The more we understand how involved Hashem is in our lives, the more we’ll attribute every last detail to His doing. What appear to be immediate causes of events are nothing more than the hand of Hashem being camouflaged. When Yosef interpreted the dream of the Sar Hamashkim, he told him that Pharaoh is going to give you back your job as the wine steward, and then he added the words, “ונתת כוס פרעה בידו כמשפט הראשון – You will put Pharaoh’s cup into his hand, like the practice in the first place.” Rabbi Akiva Eiger asked, what is the need for the repetition – that the cup will be in his hand like before? If he gets his job back, of course he’ll have the cup in his hand like before. The Rabbi answered, Yosef was teaching the Sar Hamashkim a life lesson. He said to him, “You might be thinking you’re in jail now because of the fly that was found in the king’s cup. If so, when you go back to your job, you’re probably going to rinse and check the cup dozens of times each time that you serve him. I’m telling you now, that would be a mistake. You could go back to holding the cup exactly the way you used to do it, כמשפט הראשון, because the fly was not the cause of you being in jail, but rather "כי אם זכרתני איתך", it’s because you had to be here to be the one to tell Pharaoh about me. The fly was just one of the ways that Hashem used to bring you here.” This is a very powerful lesson. Immediate causes of events are not the real causes. If we would internalize this properly, our entire view of the world would change for the better. We’ll become calmer and have more peace of mind. We’ll know Hashem is always in control. Hashem is kadosh. His greatest pleasure is to be actively involved in every part of our lives, including the most mundane areas. We should take advantage of this gift that He gave us and turn to Him all the time to ask for His help with every one of our needs.
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