Thursday, December 25, 2008

Dear Frau Frobe,
There can be no resolution, only patient endurance of the opposites which ultimately spring from your own nature. You yourself are a conflict that rages in itself and against itself in order to melt its incompatible substances - the male and the female - in the fire of suffering, and thus create that form which is the goal of life. Everyone goes through this mill, consciously or unconsciously, voluntarily or forcibly. We are crucified between the opposites and delivered up to the torture until the reconciling third takes shape. Do not doubt the rightness of the two sides within you, and let whatever may happen - happen.

The apparently unendurable conflict is proof of the rightness of your life. A life without inner contradiction is either only half a life or else a life in the Beyond, which is destined only for angels. But God loves human beings more than the angels.

With kindest regards,

C. G. Jung

C.G. Jung Letters, vol. 1, p. 375

That we were Made human beings is a profoundly powerful concept to me;

"Let your holiness be human - God has plenty of angels." - The Kotzker

"Contrary to Kant, Judaism teaches that man's ,true service of God, must be human. It should be invisible, as man's soul is invisible; and it should be visible too, because man is visible. It must be 'service of the heart, in spirit and in truth' as well as of the body. It must be service through the mitzva, the deed in which man's spiritual and material nature have unified. It is a much higher service than that of the spirit alone. It is the religion of the whole man...It is comparably easy to relate the spiritual to God; it is as easy as it is ineffective in history. The real task is to orient the whole world of man, matter and spirit, toward God."
R. Prof. Eliezer Berkovits, God, Man and History, p.126

Torah - mitzvot, history and memory, a past and a future - was Given to man, not to angels. For us to be unified or transformed from without is one thing; to emerge the unification, the transformation, from within is this "much higher service". And the abstention from it or the transgression of it matches this power. God help me, this is powerful and scary stuff!...

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