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this kind of sanctimonious despair is really just an excuse to leave God out of our lives.
That is why it is vital that we know that God does not give up on us.
When God created the world, He was not starting a business. He was enteri...
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The parent waits for the child’s return and experiences great pleasure when the child chooses to do so.
He wants us to live good lives and to treat each other kindly. He wants us to be obedient to Him—but more than He wants any of those things, He wants us to be close to Him.
praying only for knowledge of His will for
God has a will. He wants to care for us. He wants to have a relationship with us (indeed, even more than He wants us to behave perfectly).
Judaism as a covenantal religion is that God most certainly does want something from us.
This is how God makes Himself available for intimacy with His creations.
That is not to say that without our compliance, God is somehow incomplete. God requires nothing. He has no needs. But He does have a will—a will to be in a relationship with us. In fact, this will is no less than the driving force behind all of creation.
Because God needs nothing, He also did not need to create. Had He chosen not to be a Creator, He would still be God. Yet God wants to create. And He wants to create because He wants something from His creations.
God created the world because of a passionate desire to be “at home” in a realm inhabited by sentient beings with free will and ego-consciousness.
need can be “rationally” defended but a desire has no “practical” explanation.
“When it comes to a desire, you cannot ask rational questions.”
the appropriate response to a desire is either to fulfill it or not to fulfill it, but not to argue with it.
God doesn’t need us. He wants us.
But our relationship with God is not practical. It is wonderfully impractical, and that is precisely what makes it so intimate.
One cannot understand God’s relationship with His creations from a cold and analytical perspective, because God’s relationship with us is not rational. It’s not about practicality. It’s about desire, and desire is not rational.
It is not subintelligent but supraintelligent; it transcends logic.
The fact that God has a will for us and shares that will with us means that He has made Himself available to us to connect to Him in the most meaningful way.
The fulfillment of will connects us where intellect falls short.
“We will do, and we will understand” (Exodus 24:7).
And without the opportunity to serve, one cannot transcend the self—and one cannot recover.
Fulfilling God’s will should not be a burden but a manifestation of our truest self.
By developing the appropriate positive relationships with others, the addict is gradually released from the prison of self-obsession.
As the Chasidic masters taught, “If one loves the Father, one must love all His children.”
The addict in recovery learns that it is necessary to be at peace with all people, and that negative attitudes toward others, such as resentment, intolerance, and indignation, only serve to keep us sick.
are by nature exceedingly skilled at finding justifications for ourselves and, at the same time, being judgmental of others.
sponsor is a mentor; a sponsor is someone to whom to be accountable; a sponsor is someone whom you trust because they possess the qualities that you would like to have yourself.
But, in truth, no matter how far along in our spiritual development we may be, it is only by letting go of old prejudices and preconceived notions that we allow ourselves to be receptive to God.
Indeed, that may be the best definition of a friend: someone to whom we can relate without any special work involved.
friend is, quite simply, someone with whom we can identify.
Addiction is a disease of self-obsession. Recovery is healing through relating to God and to other human beings as a way of getting outside of the self.
We learn from God by learning from each other!
“The Omnipresent has many messengers to do his bidding,” and Maimonides advises, as we already once mentioned in an earlier chapter, “Receive the truth regardless of its source.”
God uses us to serve as one another’s guides, whether we know it or not.
Tolerance and goodwill to others is vital to recovery.
when we obsess on the wrongs that others have done us and see ourselves in the victim role, we remove ourselves from our relationship with God,
Quite literally, anger is a rejection of God and lack of faith.
Anger is a feeling of indignation toward a perceived injustice.
But feeling outrage about something that has already happened to us is to argue with reality, which is to argue with God.
Notwithstanding the fact that the offender may still be liable to God for his or her misdeed,
As long as we attribute to the actions of others any power to define our lives, then we submit ourselves to the tyranny of people, places, and things rather than placing ourselves in the care of God.
forgive our enemies is to take away that power and to attribute it only to God.
“You intended evil for me but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:19–20).
Not only did he have no desire for revenge, he also would not concede to his brothers that they had even done anything to him for which he should feel wronged.
that God was in control all along, and his brothers had done nothing to him that was outside of God’s plan.
What I consider ingenious about the Fourth Step is that it uses our awareness of our negative feelings to get us to the root of our troubles—ourselves.
The hallmark of the truly selfless and humble person is not that he forgives easily but that he is impossible to offend in the first place.
we want to avoid feeling slighted in the future, we will have to reduce our ego to a more useful size.
