Menachem Bluming Muses: Why Your Children Mean So Much to You

When someone cares for your child they are embracing you too because you are expressed in your child. If someone likes you but not your child, that is a contradiction to you. So too with G-d for we are each a child of G-d (Deut. Devarim 14). To love G-d but not the other is a rejection of G-d because each person expresses G-dliness in a unique fashion, a child of G-d. This includes the imperative to love ourselves too. 

Mendel (Menachem) Bluming paraphrased from Hayom Yom

Popular posts from this blog

Menachem Bluming Muses: Jewish Mourning

We are taught to be the masters of acceptance. All that G-d does is for the best, Judaism teaches us repeatedly.   Yet we do not become comfortable with death, internally we do not accept it. When Jacob was faced with the tragic death of his precious son Joseph, the Torah tells us, “Vayimaen lihisnachem” (Breishis 37), he refused to be comforted. Some understand that to mean that he had an inkling that his son was really alive, and he was indeed right. Others say that this is a general rule for the Jewish approach to refuse to be comforted or to accept the “reality” of death, because our loved ones are never really dead. Yes, the body is buried and that is very tragic and painful. Yet if we used 3 words to describe our departed loved one it would rarely describe their body. Kindness, thoughtfulness or happiness are not properties of the body they are expressions of the soul. The soul doesn't die when the body is buried and we instinctively know that and therefore refuse to ac...
Read more

Menachem Bluming Muses: NASA’s Mind Boggling Images

The new pictures from the James Webb telescope are nothing short of incredible. We understand so little of the vast universe before us. With all the unprecedented scientific and medical knowledge and even with this incredible ability to see crisp pictures from a telescope placed 1 million miles away, we are still left in the dark. Do we know why there are 925,000 species of insects on earth? Why these billions of stars and galaxies exist in the vast universe? For me the lesson is humility. I know and understand so little of the vast universe before us and therefore for me to become conceited or arrogant is so out of place. Mendel (Menachem) Bluming
Read more

Menachem Bluming Muses: How Long Would You Like to Live?

If G-d appeared to you and asked you how long you would like to live, what would you say? 100 years? 130 years? Would you make any conditions like: but they need to be healthy years? The Alter Rebbe, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, chose to bless one of his greatest followers Rabbi Yekusiel Liepler, with long life. The Chassid qualified the blessing and said that he was only willing to accept it if it would be infused with spiritual vitality for without that the years were empty and meaningless to him In Genesis Adam died at age 930, Noah was almost 500 when he started building the ark (not bad!) and Methuselah lived a world record of 969 years! Are you jealous? Would you like to live 900 years? What would you do with that time? We study and marvel at centenarians. We ask them for their secrets and diets, lifestyles and habits. I find it very intriguing that some of the greatest in our history like Amadeus Mozart or Rabbi Isaac Luria, the greatest Kabbalist of all ...
Read more