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Dear
Temple Beth Shira Family and Friends,
I
hope that your Passover has been delicious and loving. The Festival
comes to a close this week-end. And with the end of Pesach, we enter a
period of fifty days leading up to the Festival of Shavout. These fifty
days correspond to the seven weeks between the Exodus from Egypt and
the receiving of the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai. Those seven weeks
provided an opportunity for the Israelites to learn to handle the
responsibilities that accompany freedom. Only with such preparation
could they be sufficiently mature to accept God’s law.
Pirkei
Avot 6:6 teaches us that there is a virtue a day which leads to such
preparedness. “Torah is greater than the priesthood or sovereignty, for
sovereignty is acquired with thirty virtues, the priesthood with
twenty-four, and Torah is acquired with forty-eight qualities. These
are: study, listening, verbalizing, comprehension of the heart, awe,
fear, humility, joy, purity, serving the sages, companionship with
one's contemporaries, debating with one's students, tranquility, study
of the scriptures, study of the Mishnah,
minimizing engagement in business, minimizing socialization, minimizing
pleasure, minimizing sleep, minimizing talk, minimizing gaiety,
slowness to anger, good heartedness, faith in the sages, acceptance of
suffering, knowing one's place, satisfaction with one's lot, qualifying
one's words, not taking credit for oneself, likableness, love of G-d,
love of humanity, love of charity, love of justice, love of rebuke,
fleeing from honor, lack of arrogance in learning, reluctance to hand
down rulings, participating in the burden of one's fellow, judging him
to the side of merit, correcting him, bringing him to a peaceful
resolution [of his disputes], deliberation in study, asking and
answering, listening and illuminating, learning in order to teach,
learning in order to observe, wising one's teacher, exactness in
conveying a teaching, and saying something in the name of its speaker…”
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