Do we have a sixth sense?
There is a commandment: “Ye shall be holy; for I the Lord your God am holy” (Leviticus 19:2). But how do we know we are on the right path? Some of us might run through a checklist: “I gave charity; check. I loved my neighbor today; check. I lit Shabbat candles; check.” But for most of us, doing right just feels right — like a satisfying chord of music. Likewise, doing wrong just feels wrong, like hearing a beginner scrape at a violin.
How are we to understand this? That our bodies are attuned to holiness the way the ear is attuned to music? I once overheard a woman say of her favorite synagogue: “It’s the only place where I feel spirituality.” Stranger yet, her friend nodded her head in agreement, “I feel the same way.”
But perhaps the idea is not so strange. We pause when a piano sonata is played beautifully. We can discern when a painting is transformed into a work of art. We can get lost in the petals of a rose or swept up in the majesty of mountains — we admit to an aesthetic sense, a musical sense, a sense of joy or a sense of sorrow.
But might we also have a sacred sense — a sixth sense, if you will — a sense of the holy?
The challenge, though, is not in admitting that we have it; that’s easy. We know when a sermon sets the heart alight. We know when an old synagogue melody stirs the wind in our chest. The true test is tuning it, evolving it, so that we begin to listen for holiness not on the rare occasion but every day amid the mayhem of our lives. This task is far from easy.
Read the rest in this week's Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles: "Seeing with the Sixth Sense"
I hope to see your comments there!
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