Off the Pulpit: Special Edition for Shabbat

By RABBI DAVID WOLPE

Many tales are told of chasidic wonder workers who could magically see events far away. Today of course technology enables what was once a miracle.

The merit of the rabbis was that seeing far did not preclude seeing close. When we are so fixated at the wonders that farsightedness brings that we forget the world at hand, a gift becomes an obstacle.

Life is about knowledge and discovery, but above both it is about encounter. The highest pitch of life is the difficult, fraught, astonishing face to face dialogue between two people, listening, talking, struggling to express and understand.

A full life is one marked not only by knowledge but by presence. Souls are shaped at the dinner table as surely as the study hall or the solitary mountaintop. Every now and then the screen must go dark so the soul can shine bright.

(Rabbi David Wolpe is the spiritual leader of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles.)