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GENESIS — 24:67 loved

GEN1196 Nowhere are the ethical ideals of married love more tenderly expressed than in Judaism. In our religion, it means ideals and spiritual experiences shared; it signifies the struggle to work out together the will of God in everyday life and the effort to make the home a place of friendliness, refreshment and peace. In the happy home, God becomes more real to all who dwell there and to those who visit it. This aim is suggested by the other word for marriage, Nissuin, which means an uplifting of the soul and an ennoblement of human desires. There is a verse in the Bible which contains both a warning and a definition of the true marriage of souls. [this verse] The words “and he loved her” come after the words “and she became his wife.”   Logic would have reversed the order. What lesson does the verse convey? To teach that love after marriage is the sequel and the effect of a perfect partnership in which joys, anxieties and responsibilities are shared jointly and unstintingly. Cynics say that marriage is wonderful at the start but soon romance fades away and then all is not “happily ever after”.   A dull monotonous round in “double harness” takes the place of what seemed, “once upon a time”, such a thrilling state of existence. Some marriages are like that; but they need not be. “When husband and wife”, says the writer of ‘The Threshold of Marriage’, “are purposed to work for happiness, to learn by mistakes in their understanding of one another, then marriage becomes more interesting and more joyful each year. Here is an illustration. You light your sitting-room fire. At first, the wood and paper flare up, and the flames flicker and dance. Yet it is only when the fire settles down to the steady glow that it really does its job and provides the comfort and the satisfaction you look for. So it is with marriage. The later years of mature love and deeper experience may have lost some of the sparkle of ‘first love’; but what they have gained is precious beyond compare.” It is in the relationship of the partners after marriage that our ethical teachings are seen at their best. The husband is to honour his wife more than himself and to supply her with all the comforts of life she needs; of course, in measure of his means. If he does so, he will be a happy man; for blessings come to a home on account of a good and virtuous woman. Here are some of these blessings: she rears his children; she it is who makes it possible for him to pursue his studies undisturbed by attending to his physical wants; she alone can fill the house with happiness and holiness.   More than one religious historian of our people has borne witness that the wonderful and mysterious preservation of the Jews is due to the Jewish woman. This is her glory not alone in the history of her own people but in the history of the world.   LEHRMAN 250-1

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GENESIS — 25:11 blessed

GEN1202 We are obligated to comfort a mourner.  … When a person visits someone who is sitting shivah (the seven-day period of mourning), he fulfills the commandment to emulate God Sotah 14a.   It is especially important to visit someone who probably will not have other visitors.   This is what Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch wrote about consoling the bereaved: “Be with him from whom God has taken a member of his family, and make him feel that though the individual dies, the Jewish community never dies.   Let his sorrow for the deceased by softened by the sympathy of the community.  Stay by him and show him that he is not forsaken.   Comfort him, remind him of the teachings of the Torah, show him how everything is only loaned, and that we have to give thanks for its withdrawal even as we give thanks for its bestowal.   Show him that in both days of joy and of adversity there are opportunities of fulfilling tasks which God’s wise love has imposed on us for our own salvation.  Console him, and melt the bitter sorrow into silent dedication to God’s will.   Do not say, however, ‘What can one do, one must resign oneself,’ for that is not consolation but blasphemy; it is the murmuring of the helpless against his helplessness, not the recognition of the blessed wisdom of God Shulchan Aruch, Yorah Daiah 376:2.   Sit silently by until the mourner himself gives vent to his sorrow in words, and leave him as soon as your presence seems to be a disturbance and he shows that he wishes to be alone with his grief.” Horeb, pp. 433-4.  It is fitting to direct the conversation to the subject of the deceased, and especially to mention the good qualities which endeared him to others.   Someone who purposely avoids mentioning the deceased, believing that in this way he will take the mind of the mourner off his grief, does not fully understand the psychology of grief.   A visit spent discussing trivialities is far less consoling to the mourner than a visit during which the deceased’s well-spent life is considered.  To be a Jew, p. 303.  PLYN 93-4

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