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B'nai Emet -> Messages -> Conservative Jewish Commitment -> 2002Fitting God into a Tight ScheduleThe daily morning service (Siddur Sim Shalom, page 9) teaches us how to fit God into a tight schedule. It tells us the Mishnah teaches: “These are the deeds for which there is no prescribed measure [i.e., no minimum or maximum to be achieved in order to receive “credit” for the mitzvah]: leaving crops at the corner of a field for the poor, offering first fruits as a gift to the Temple, bringing special offerings to the Temple on the three festivals [Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot], doing deeds of loving kindness, and studying Torah. And then we find a brief excerpt of the Gemara which seems to be building on this Mishnah: “These are the deeds that yield immediate fruit [benefit] and continue to yield fruit in time to come: honoring parents; doing deeds of loving kindness; attending the house of study punctually morning and evening; providing hospitality; visiting the sick; helping a needy bride; attending the dead; probing the meaning of prayer; making peace between one person and another and between a husband and wife. And the study of Torah is the most basic of them all.” Why did the Rabbis of the Mishnah and Talmud teach these ideas? And why did the generations of Siddur editors select these sections for immediate inclusion as we start the day? Perhaps if we are not yet ready, available, or capable of lengthy davening or joining a minyan or wearing a tallit and tefillin, we can still fit God into our lives often during the day. In fact, to act with God’s presence as an immediate reality in our deeds is the essence of Jewishness and humanity. Each morning, take out this text in your Siddur and read it to yourself, or out loud, or with your family, to set the tone for being a Jew, living as a Jew, incorporating Jewish Talmudic values and ideals as your own. It will be the start of a beautiful love affair with HaShem. Rabbi Nina Beth Cardin observed about this piece of Talmud, “It teaches a most powerful lesson: that the possibility of performing life’s holiest tasks is not beyond us, not “in the heavens”, but right here in our daily encounters with family, friends, and strangers. And yet there is a deed that is missing from this list which appears in the Talmudic source: rearing one’s children in the ways of Torah. Raising one’s child or the children of the community surely merits a place of honor in our morning prayers.” |
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