Description
IT’S ALL ABOUT ENERGY.
You can have the greatest idea in the world,
but without the energy to implement it,
the idea won’t survive. Yet, if you have energy,
you can often come up with great ideas and accomplish great things.
Energy is one of those things that permeates existence,
and yet we don’t fully understand it.
We found it in Creation and after studying it,
we learned to recognize its patterns.
Eventually we even figured out how to harness energy to extend
our abilities and overcome human limitations.
We know many sources of energy,
but not THE source of energy.
Well, at least those people who do not believe in God do not.
The rest of us have no doubt about Who generates all the energy,
and we declare this twice a day (at least) in the “Shema.”
God is the “Ba’al HaKochos,” the “Master of All Forces.”
This is why,
search as the God-doubters might in the physical realm for THE source of energy,
they cannot find it.
They assume,
or rather hope,
that since energy acts so physical that its source must be physical as well.
They might as well chase their tails.
It reveals the power of stubbornness and cognitive dissonance.
Some very sophisticated minds refuse to accept that the answer they seek
about energy is religious by nature.
Consequently,
people with far less sophisticated but spiritually-open minds
know this as a result of education and intuition.
The irony is that it is the “Ba’al HaKochos” who gives atheists the
energy to deny God as the Source of that energy.
The very life He gives them and continues to support is what they use to reject Him.
How crazy is that?
It is difficult even for people who believe in all this to remain mindful of it.
We know God gave us everything and is responsible for all that we have at every moment.
Yet, we act at times as if we can do things behind God’s back,
as if He does not see everything we do at all times.
It’s the great yetzer hara con job.
Aside from the energy that God pumps into Creation each moment just to support life,
He also provides “extra” energy.
There are times when God ramps it up because something special has to happen in history,
and “additional” energy is required to make it happen.
Take the exodus, for example.
On the surface of it,
“Yetzias Mitzrayim” looks as if God simply stepped into history,
squashed Pharaoh,
and the Jewish people simply “spilled” out of Egypt.
If you press down on the side of a plastic swimming pool,
the water inside will leak over the top.
We see however that this was not the case.
Even after the surviving Jews (four-fifths died in the Plague of Darkness) physically left Egypt, they had a difficult time mentally leaving Egypt.
They even considered running back there when life in the desert became challenging.
They left Egypt with an exalted hand (Shemos 14:8), but it did not remain “exalted” after they left.
The same thing was true at Har Sinai.
The Torah portrays how the Jewish people rose to the occasion to accept Torah, even becoming nationally unified (Rashi, Shemos 19:3).
Forty days later however, they built the golden calf and ruin everything. They even hurried away from Mt. Sinai like children when the school bell rings (Tosfos, Shabbos 88a).
There are many instances of the same idea.
In fact, if one were to track all the times when something great happened in history,
Jewish or gentile,
he could graph Divine energy influx over the ages.
Everything requires the same Divine energy to make it happen.
The Age of Enlightenment would be a recent example of this idea.
From a religiously uninformed point of view,
the Age of Enlightenment was an eventuality.
Man simply gets smarter over time and more advanced.
He was bound to become “enlightened” at some point in the future.
The historical truth is that this is not always historically true.
There are times when entire societies either stagnate or socially regress,
the Holocaust being a good case in point.
If a society does advance,
it is often on the back of an event or events that just “happened” to occur when and how they did.
The bottom line is that mankind advances because God wants him to.
God inspires man to do what he does, and then gives him the means to be successful.
Advancement is neither natural or a right. It’s based upon the master plan for Creation, and the Divine timetable to fulfill it.
This means that when God wants something to occur in history,
the energy will be there in Creation to make it possible.
If it is something that cannot be accomplished with the current level of energy,
God will infuse Creation with the additional energy.
This idea has major implications.
It both explains questionable historical events,
and serves as a warning for the future.
Yes, it is all about the energy.
But, it is also about who uses the energy, and how.
