gyroscope is a spinning top with two wheels, each moving at slightly different speeds, thus providing balance and direction.
When a Jew asks, "What should I know to be a Jew?" the two distinct wheels of the Jewish gyroscope – life cycle events and the holiday calendar – help us formulate a response. The Jewish life cycle (better, the Jewish life spiral; Reb Moshe teaches us to visualize life as a spiral, not a cycle, since we change with each revolution) contains all of those precious moments of human experience, from birth to death and beyond. Like all human beings, Jews have had a perspective on these events: how they should be celebrated, how they affect us as individuals and families, how they affect the community, and how they measure our personal and spiritual growth. Whether it is the birth of a child, the death of a parent, a marriage, , or a divorce, the Jewish tradition has provided us with ways of understanding, doing, and also innovating when necessary to make life spiral events meaningful.
The life spiral, with all its variations, engages with the constancy of the Jewish calendar and its celebratory and commemorative events. For instance, one can celebrate the Passover seder through the eyes of a child or the eyes of a parent or grandparent, and this celebration will (hopefully) take on different meanings in different stages of our life. In a sense, the constancy of the calendar cycle, with its weekly Shabbat as its crown, serves as a measuring device in much the same way a family would mark the back of a closet door to note a child’s physical growth.
An answer to the question, "What should I know to be a Jew?" proceeds from an internalization of a balanced interplay of the life spiral and the calendar cycle. By cultivating such an awareness, we promote a life of meaning and connection to our past, our present, and our future.
gyroscope is a spinning top with two wheels, each moving at slightly different speeds, thus providing balance and direction.
