This week, actually last night I was at a very interesting class on learning about myself. I like to feel that I am pretty comfortable with myself. Most people today really are not so comfortable with themselves. You can tell who is and who is not, those who spend an astronomical amount of time on facebook, their phones, with music or in constant company of an other person are not comfortable with themselves. Last year in a class I took about Pirke Avot (Ethics of our Fathers) we spoke a little about being comfortable with ones self. Since that is not the focus of this post I will leave that for another time.
Now since I do not want to make this post too overwhelmingly long I will split it into 2 parts.
This part will just start with the basic background. This class started off talking about why the first letter of the Torah is a "Bet" ב the reasoning behind this will be shown in the following drawing.
First things to know is that the base line is called the life line. It is the chronological line that your life progresses on. The line along the top of the Bet is the sky line, it is in a way Shamayim. Now the red lines represent what you do in your life. You will notice that they are curved, this is to show us that what ever we put into life is what we will be getting out of it. Here is where I'm starting my journey. When you are negative in your life then only negative things will come back to you, the same with positive things.
Along the vertical line of the bet is where our traits and deeds come in. In the next post we will speak more about the traits and deeds, but basically they are what you are "sending" up to shamayim. When you do a good deed, it promotes your good trait and good things will come back down to you from shamayim.
Now the pink boxes near the top are where faith comes in. There is an argument that because Jews do not have faith. I'm not really sure that I believe that. But faith sits there because it is the connection between your doings in the world and what shamayim is sending down to you.
One last point on the bet before I end this post. Someone in the class asked why the Torah didn't start with a "Kuff" כ after all they are the same shape. But you will notice that on the bet there is a small extra piece that is not under the shamayim. This small piece represents the time when you are a child and don't have control of your actions in the world. This is the time when things are only coming down because you do not have to capabilities yet to change what you are sending up.