I was 15 years old when my father first recommended that I start working out. He bought all of the equipment, the bench press and the dumbbells, and I created a space at home where I could begin my exercising endeavors. My first day working out was quite amusing in retrospect. I did 100 repetitions of bicep curls at once. It didn’t seem like a big deal at first. That is, until two days later, when an excruciating pain ran down the upper half of my arm. I couldn’t move it, and as the day went by the pain only increased. I thought to myself “You have a long way to go.”  Working out was painful, but it was rewarding. It took me a while to connect the pain to a process that was bigger than what I was experiencing at the moment. In the first year of my working out the pain was bitter, but as years progressed, the pain became sweet, because I knew that the end result would be a gain and not a loss. The pain was only a medium, an illusion.

One of the hardest questions to answer is “why do we suffer?”  What’s the point of pain? It doesn’t seem right that bad things happen to good people. And even further why should there be bad things to begin with? It’s even harder to simultaneously juxtapose one’s belief in God while undergoing a painful ordeal. Because if God is good and benevolent as we read in the Birkat Hamazon then why do horrific events occur in the world either from nature or from people?

The Creator is the source from which an interconnected system of worlds emerges. These worlds are termed in Hebrew as olamot from the Hebrew word he’elem meaning concealment. These systems of worlds can be thought of as the “software” that runs the “hardware,” our world. It follows that that software simultaneously governs this world (olam) and conceals (he’elem) itself from our world, like drapes concealing the light of the sun on a hot summer day. When we experience any phenomenon in our world as either good or bad it’s not the whole picture we’re looking at, because we are unaware of the process that this “software” is leading us toward, that it is geared towards our development as humanity. But what if we understood this process?

Imagine we can connect to this system of worlds, this “software”. The Art Scroll commentary on the Torah portion Beshalach explains a fascinating experience that the nation of Israel attained. It was a degree of the revelation of the system of worlds to such an extent that they understood how all of the previously tormenting and excruciating experiences they went through in Egypt at the hands of Pharaoh were really parts of a coherent symphony of events that had to take place the way they did in order for them to reach the state of bliss they were in when the seas parted on Pharaoh. It was a sensation of how sweet the bitterness they experienced was, and it is a state that we can gain the capacity to experience if we open our minds and hearts to that possibility.

My interest in water peaked when I took my first general chemistry course in college. My professor asked a rather profound, yet simple question, “Why does salt dissolve in water, but not oil?” I had never even pondered such an idea, and it got me thinking, my interest peaked. “Like dissolves like,” he said, but I didn’t know what that meant. With some more studying, I finally understood the beauty of that statement. It had such infinite implications as I connected the idea to the internality of the Torah, human interaction, and nature’s laws. Those words, that phrase, was music to me, a symphony realizing itself from within.

Put simply, any molecule is the result of the connection between two or more elements. Water, also known as H₂O, is literally two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. When you connect these elementary parts together it builds something so much greater than the sum of its parts. Two elements, which are both invisible to the naked eye, when put together, form a liquid that is the basis of almost all life. Upon examining the nature of the connection between the elements, the “line” that connects them together, scientists discovered that the molecule is bent, exuding magnetic qualities due to a partial dipole. Put simply, imagine some water just spilled on your table, there’s a tiny puddle with little droplets dispersed throughout the surface. If you move the puddle around you’ll notice how little droplets start to converge and form bigger droplets, like tiny little magnets that attract each other.

And like any magnet, water can only dissolve or attach itself to something with magnetic properties. A magnet will not attract paper, because the properties of paper do not resemble the properties of the magnet. Rather magnets attract metals, because the properties of most metals are similar to the properties of a magnet. That’s why everything doesn’t dissolve in water, it’s because not everything has similar magnetic properties like water does; there’s nothing to attract.

This coming month is called Elul, an acronym for ani ledodi vedodi li (I am for my beloved and my beloved is for me). It is a month of love, a month of attraction, a month where we examine how much we’ve come closer to Hashem by trying to emulate Him in our personal and interpersonal relationships. How often do we take for granted what the Creator has put forth in front of us? We ignore Him, we don’t appreciate Him, and every second of every day He is still there counting patiently until we’ll realize the purpose for which we were created. How often do we detach ourselves because we think we’re not as good as Him, that we don’t deserve Him, that we’re not good enough, smart enough, pretty enough, anything enough? And it’s no wonder this generation thinks itself as completely detached from holiness, because we ARE, because we’re convinced that we’re nothing like it. How can we connect to our beloved Creator if we’re not for Him the way He is for us?

The Baal Shem Tov says “A yid doesn’t sin because he wants to, but because he’s been separated from his Father in heaven”. We don’t screw up because we’re bad, we screw up because we don’t understand how special we are. But once we reach a state where we understand our greatness, as an individual, and as a collective, then we invite something that has been knocking on our door since the beginning of creation, we invite a love, an attachment, a relationship with the most beautiful thing in the world. I wish that everyone comes to understand how special they are, it breaks Hashem’s heart if we don’t

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Genesis is the statement of God creating man in His image. It begs many questions of how that even makes sense. Is God a human being just like us? What does it mean that He created man in His image if it does not imply that we are a copy of Him? Furthermore, if that is the case then how could God be anything more than just a superhuman that made copies of Himself? And if God has no form, but we do, that is,  if everything in the world has boundaries and is limited by some property (height, width, length, time) but God is absolutely unlimited, as is written, “For He has no place, no boundary, no name” (Ari, The Tree of Life, Part One, Gate One), then what could we possibly have in common? How can limited and unlimited be similar? It seems unlikely that we can reconcile the idea that we are created in His image if we are under the axiom that God by definition is unimaginable. An analogy would answer this dilemma. DNA is the genetic information contained within the cells that comprise living organisms; it is the manual through which cells create other cells and proteins in order to continue life. Nearly every single cell in a human body (and any other organism) contains within it the same respective genetic information. That is, a bone cell and a skin cell contain within them identical genetic code. However, skin cells utilizes a different aspect of DNA in order to create other cells and proteins for skin and the same applies to bone cells. On a whole body level a human is the result of the transcription and subsequent translation of genetic information in the form of DNA into physical matter. It therefore can be said that we are made in the image of DNA, since DNA is the manual for a cell to differentiate and proliferate. DNA and protein, that is, the information that cells contain within them–the manual that they use to create things–and the DNA are completely different in form, but exactly the same in essence. God can  be thought as the source from which everything emanates, the program of reality itself, which is rendered from a formless unknown, unlimited spiritual information, into a vast, but limited reality in which we are contained.

My parents got into an argument the other day and they were both infuriated at each other. Details don’t matter. My father’s anger dissipated quickly, but my mom was still upset. Time passed and things got pretty awkward. All of a sudden, my father asked her, “Sweetie, do you remember where you put my shaver?” (he shaved an hour ago). My mother answers, and then my father responds and gradually, they started talking to each other. Slowly, but surely, they rose above their tension  and connected with each other. My father didn’t want the meaningless shaver, he wanted the connection he had with her, he wanted the intimacy that left him.

The Torah explains that we have to relate to God, literally. Meaning, we have to understand our connection to the Creator as we would an intimate relationship: “And you shall love your God with all your heart” (Deuteronomy 6:5). The heart constitutes the sum total of one’s desires. I’m sure everyone’s heard of the term “follow your heart.” It’s not the muscle that pumps blood throughout the body to which I’m referring, but the seat of one’s inner deficiencies. Furthermore the Babylonian Talmud asks “What sort of (avodah) work is there in the heart?-Prayer (T’fila)” (Ta’anit 2a). It’s no cooncidence that prayer is understood to be the avodah shebalev (the work in the heart). It follows that if prayer is the work in the heart, and the heart is the summation of all one’s desires, then prayer is the work with one’s desires, their wants.

What do we want? We want pleasure, satisfaction, a sense of wholeness…to feel good all the time, the greater the duration of the satisfaction the better. And we tend to fulfill ourselves by acquiring various forms of material pleasures (money, cars, partying, etc). But if we delve deep enough, we’ll understand that we really don’t want things. Rather, we want the fulfillment those things give us. Nobody wants a car, money, etc. We want the fulfillment the car, the money, or the partying will give us; the material we think we want is really a bridge to connect to a sensation that’s much deeper than the physical thing we acquire, it’s a non-physical sensation. What does a good feeling look like? What does it smell like? Does it have a color? The sensation of satisfaction is not physical, it’s spiritual. To reiterate, pleasure is an internal experience, which we acquire through external means, we delve into ourselves and our discernments and reach a state of bliss through an interaction with our surroundings. But what if we didn’t need the externality? What if we could connect to that inner delight within ourselves without the need for external means? Remember external means are just shells that cover an inner delight within ourselves that is then uncovered. We have to fulfill our desires in a different way. This is the work in the heart, the avodah shebalev, it is working with desires and filling them in a different way, by connecting to God, the energy and vitality for everything, and to connect to the Creator is synonymous to connecting to the source from which all pleasures are derived. Imagine the feeling, of boundless energy permeating you, you would forget what you asked for and pay attention to the the intimacy, the connection. Because the intensity of the pleasure exceeds the delight we’d acquire through external means.

Prayer was set forth to connect to HaShem, not to ask Him for stuff for the sake of getting stuff, but to have the opportunity to ask just to be close to Him. You don’t need the thing that you’re asking for, you only need it to the extent you can make contact with Him. We don’t pay attention to the reward, but rather the greatness and omnipotence of Giver of the reward (RABASH). That’s the beauty of prayer.

Founder and President of Ne-Emanim Faithful, a non-profit Jewish organization whose purpose is to spread authentic Judaism to the masses.