| So pervasively spiritual, you can't separate it from the physical.
The Babylonian Talmud teaches: whenever ten Jews are together in one place, the Divine Presence dwells amongst them.
In the Baal HaTanya's Igeret HaKodesh (Letter of Holiness, The fourth section of his book The Tanya), He writes in the 23rd chapter:
I heard from my Rebbes (The Baal Shem Tov and the Magid of Meszrich) that: Were an Angel to stand in the presence of ten Jews together, even if they were not at present speaking of Torah, great awe (without limit or end) of the Divine Presence (Shechina) will fall upon him until he will utterly cease to exist.
This illustrates, the Baal HaTanya explains, why it is so crucial that when ten Jews are together they keep God foremost in their minds and pray or learn Torah with the appropriate respect and never behave in a foolish fashion, heaven forbid.
Here we have a case of physical beings whose spiritual experience is so holy, spiritual beings cannot bear the experience of it. The Divine Presence, the Baal HaTanya explains, is infinite and so it is beyond our mortal ken even when it dwells amongst us. In the midst of the experience itself, it is still beyond our awareness. This might be difficult to understand, if not impossible, and so he compares it to the way in which our soul dwells in our body. It is what gives us life, and through living we experience it. Every part of life is infused with the soul, we cannot point to any limb or nerve and say, "that, over there, that is where the soul resides". We cannot divide the experience of having a soul from simply being, just as we cannot separate the present from the past or the future.1
The Baal HaTanya, or master of the Tanya is so named because he wrote the book of that name. He was the first Lubavitcher Rebbe. He was part of the Third generation of the Hasidic movement, a spiritual grandson of the Baal Shem Tov (master of the good name).
1. This comparison to time is my own, as far as I am aware. So I cannot be sure whether it properly illustrates the point, but it seems to.
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