A Slow Reading of The Introduction to "The Path of the Just" (Part 8)

8.

"If we neither consider nor investigate the true nature of G-d-reverence and its ramifications, how can we hope to attain it or to rescue ourselves from the vacuity of things of this world which have us forget it?"

-- ... since, as we saw in part 6, "piety, G-d-reverence and love, and purity of heart are not so ingrained in your heart that you would not have to find the means of acquiring them".

"Will it not be entirely gone and forgotten despite our acknowledgment of a responsibility to it? And if we do not try to set Divine-love in our hearts by the use of all things that would bring it to us, how will it be found within us?"

-- So, we have to consciously and zealously work at all this, since the inertia that sets into the soul if we don't is both stultifying and deadly.

"How will attachment to G-d and longing for Him and His Torah come to us if we pay no heed to His greatness and exaltedness, which inevitably result in that attachment? How are we to purify our thoughts if we do not attempt to clear away the blemishes that the human condition places upon us? How are our personalities which need so much rectifying and setting-straight going to be rectified and set straight if we do not apply ourselves to the task with a great persistence?"

-- Ramchal underscored the first point of this paragraph, that we're to attach unto G-d, in this work's first chapter where he declared that at bottom "we were created to delight in G-d and enjoy the radiance of His Divine presence" and that "true spiritual wholeness is nothing other than the clutching onto G-d". His next point here, then, is that we'd have to pay close attention to G-d's greatness and exaltedness if we're to attach unto Him indeed, as well as to purify our thoughts, rectify our personality, and that we'd need to do that all persistantly.

Translation of text (c) 1996 Rabbi Yaakov Feldman
Original comments (c) 2005 Rabbi Yaakov Feldman