Have you ever been inspired?
Maybe something struck a chord as you listened to a speech or witnessed a special moment; perhaps you were hit ‘out of the blue’ by a high-minded thought.
The experience can be exhilarating.
But inspiration, in and of itself, doesn’t effect change.
Inspiration, even when granted by G-d, is basically a flash-in-the-pan experience, until it prompts the critical step of actually making something outof that special sentiment. Unless my world actually changes, an uplifting thought is just that; it’s a fleeting high, not a substantive re-alignment of my life, attitude, etc.
I think we instinctively feel this.
G-d designed us to truly appreciate, to own, something when we accomplish it with our internally-generated efforts. It’s when we see our actions bear fruit that life’s real beauty kicks in.
Gifts are nice, but they’re not where genuine meaning is found.
When we’re pro-active and change the status quo; that’s a true accomplishment. When we take what G-d has given us, when we take life’s gifts and expand their natural boundaries through our own sweat, then, in the Talmud’s words, we have become “Partners with G-d in the work of Creation.”
To use imagery from this week’s Torah portion:
Scripture tells us that “the soul of man is G-d’s flame”; we are each an individual flame, kindled by G-d to illuminate our lives.
When the Holy Temple’s Menorah was kindled, the wicks needed to be lit so that each flame would [in the Torah’s words] “blaze upward of its own accord”.
In other words: Sometimes you light a flame and it doesn’t seem to have its own “legs”; it needs to be nurtured, maybe you need to tilt the candle a bit, etc. That kind of flame didn’t suffice for the Menorah. It needed to have its own strength.
For a flame to be worthy of the Menorah, for a flame to be capable of truly illuminating the world, it needed to have some character of its own.
In a similar sense: We are thankful to G-d for touching the “match to our wick” and giving us the flame of life. But now it’s time for our inner fire to rise, to blaze forth, on its own energy.
We can’t just be satisfied with what G-d has given us, we need to dig within ourselves to find our inner fuel, to make our flame glow bright and strong.
That takes effort.
But it makes life a much brighter experience.