The Path of the Just
Chapter 25 (Part 3)
Ramchal ends this next-to-last chapter with a refreshingly honest though
saddening perspective on all this. Being constantly aware of G-d’s presence
and sensing His being all around us “is very unnatural to us,” he says,
“because of the limited, this-worldly nature of our senses”. That’s to say
that since we depend so very much on what we see, hear, touch, smell, and
taste as our arbiters of reality, it stands to reason that G-d and the whole
of His upper realm is beyond our scope, and thus off our “radar screen”.
What then will foster it and -- even more so -- will imprint it upon our
beings so that we could live with the knowledge that G-d’s being infuses the
universe and interacts with it? “It only comes with study”, Ramchal
responds, with Torah study that is.
But he’s not referring to the sort of Torah study that comes to simply
taking in data and relying on logical proofs. The kind of Torah study he’s
referring to is the sort that somehow allows the ideas implanted in the
Torah to settle deeply into the bones, that corroborates our deeper sense of
G-d’s reality, and that affirms what the heart and soul already know. And it
“involves reflecting and meditating upon” what you’d have garnered by that
sort of Torah study “at all times-- when you’re (otherwise) relaxing, (as
well as when you’re) traveling, lying down, and awakening”.
Only then will “the veracity of this-- that the Divine presence is
ever-present, and that we stand before G-d each and every moment-- be fixed
in your mind. Only then can you truly fear and revere G-d”.
