The Spirit and the Heart

Shlomo Shock • 2007

The true generous spirit trickles all the way down to the uplifted heart and becomes generosity of the heart.

g

g

“Every man whose heart uplifted him came, and everyone whose spirit inspired him to generosity brought the offering of the Lord…”

When we wish to raise a donation or give charity to an individual or the community, a delicate and fragile spiritual motion is formed within us that requires special attention, as to from where inside ourselves did this need to give arouse from, and what is really motivating us to give to the other.

Not one of us justifies his or her existence straight away from the first moment of existence. The path of our life is not a highway of selfless and righteous good deeds. The start of every action and will to give stems from the lowly natural need to express ourselves. Our hart- ‘Every man whose heart uplifted him’covets to feel its existence. Through this feeling of ‘self’ we shape our goals in life, and feel that we are alive.

We don’t start off from Lishma - selfless acts. Our Lishma is buried deep within our selfish daily actions. ‘מתוך שלא לשמה בא לשמה’ literally, from within.  Somewhere deep inside of ‘Every man whose heart uplifted him’ is the second half of the verse: ‘everyone whose spirit inspired him to generosity’. The uplifting of the heart must pass through the exposure of the generous spirit within,

This spiritual generosity is our true core. It extracts us from the superficiality of giving, and allows us to be part of something much greater then our own ego. Our psychological feeling changes as well, as the wings of our spirit are ready to embark on the journey we’ve always yearned for.

Our giving becomes more then a reflection of our environment. The spiritual generosity grants us a dimension of independence, we are not busy making comparisons with others, and do not measure ourselves according to the environments expectations. The spiritual generosity knows itself from within itself, and activates us without any calculations that aren’t related to the actual truth.

“Every man and woman whose heart inspired them to generosity to bring for all the work that the Lord had commanded”

The true generous spirit trickles all the way down to the uplifted heart and becomes generosity of the heart, ‘every generous hearted person’. The heart and the spirit joined together to free us of all illness of the obsessive ego, and all the vows ( the sages see this term ‘generous hearted’ as a source for annulling vows)  that grasp us by the neck and threaten to paralyze us, are disintegrated and loose their superficial roughness. The generosity grants us freedom from all the performances that we’ve been putting on and allows us to accept ourselves as well as our surroundings as humane and frail as they are.

צור קשר

    ישיבת שיח יצחק גבעת הדגן - אפרת, מיקוד: 90435