Gut vokh! In honor of my 613th follower (the number of commandments in the Torah): one like, one phenomenological/theological opinion (no politics, I promise bli neder!). For each one that gets at least one like, I’ll do a whole thread at some point. Alright, here goes Nothin’.

1. All of reality is infinitely layered and fractal.

2. No event in reality has only one cause. Everything that happens has multiple “reasons” for happening, Divine or otherwise.

3. All human distinctions between order and disorder—i.e. the act of interpretation—are artificial and therefore inherently flawed. From a Divine perspective (mi-tsido) everything is either in perfect order or in perfect disorder. The secret is that they’re the same.

4. Being created in G?d’s image (and that’s everyone, not just Jews) doesn’t just mean you have a G?dmade microchip (aka a soul). It means you are written into the code. You literally are a piece (emphasis on piece) of
G?d living the script G?d wrote for
G?dself.

5. Every moment is a new reality. Nothing in this world is truly static, except G?d. The biggest mistake we can make is that we are unchanging.

6. Divine reward and punishment is not reactionary. Every action you do, every word you speak, every thought you have, is not limited to the time it explicitly occurs. Every thing that seems to happen as a result is simply a reverberation of the original act in a new reality.

7. There is no essential purpose of knowledge qua knowledge. The essential purpose of all knowledge is connection, whether with other people, the universe, or G?d.

8. Every feeling is comprised of an immediate emotional reaction and a subsequent cognitiveish (but still emotional) response to that emotion. Feelings are strong because these two reverberate off each other.

9. As a result, half of successful emotional functioning is learning to recognize your feelings, and the other half is learning to separate the initial emotion from the subsequent response so you can modulate the reverberations.

10. The majority of problems in contemporary prayer began when prayer started to be understood as a thing you do, rather than a way of being.

11. The majority of spiritual problems in contemporary Judaism can be attributed to the fact that our ancestors took upon themselves more than the bare minimum, and all of that has now become our bare minimum. (Not suggesting we stop doing it, just that we understand it that way)

12. Modern Orthodoxy’s tragic (and I believe fatal) flaw was to think that Torah and Madda are separate, instead of realizing that everything is Torah (because, as we know, Torah consists of hierarchical layers).