Are we suffering from too much JUDAISM ??

For a lot of Jewish history, the avoid was pretty obvious. A Jew lived in some freezing village in Poland or a scorching hot town in Lebanon where the nearest Tam Khak was three towns away and sar were rare and money was scarce. And getting to was about as realistic as getting to Mars. There were no Torah anytime apps. There were no podcasts. There were no WhatsApp statuses with dailyiz. There were no kosher vacations. There was no kir of conventions and tishabove films. You didn't have 500 shirim waiting for you at the click of a button. If a Jew managed to hear a great drasha once a year, it'd stay with him for months. If he owned a few sarim, he treasured them. If he even saw a sadic, he'd tell his grandchildren about it 60 years later. The show barely had sided. Most people didn't live within 500 miles of yeshiva. And even if you did, you might not been able to afford to go or send your son there. For women, formal Jewish education was non-existent. You simply relied on a few stories you heard, the occasional dé ty at a shabas meal and the tahillim you knew by heart. That was it. You didn't have access to endless tyra. You'd have endless inspiration. You didn't have a thousand different ways to remind yourself that you're a Jew. You had what you had. And because you had so little of it, you treasured every bit of it. The avoida of many people was to take a world that felt spiritually dark and somehow inject yideskite into it to bring holiness into a life that didn't really naturally contain much of it. But nowadays I think our challenge is almost the exact opposite. Today to a certain extent we're drowning in Judaism. We have so much access to spirituality that spirituality itself can start feeling ordinary. You know what happens when you visit arcrol once in your lifetime? You kiss the ground. You cry at the kaisle. You stare at the hills of your shell in just utter disbelief. You know what happens when you go every year? It starts to feel like another vacation. Which hotel are you staying at? Which restaurant did you eat at? Which boutique store, leather store, wood carving store, Judeaica store did you go to this time? Which tour did you go on? You shall starts competing with Miami. The holiest city on earth starts getting processed by the same part of the brain that processes Cancun. Or take Shaw. Imagine bringing a Jew from 500 years ago into some of our shores with crystal chandeliers and beautiful woodwork and air conditioning and coffee stations and thousands of sparum. A building worth literally tens of millions of dollars. He he would look around and faint. We walk in and say, "Hey, where's the decaf coffee?" Or or how about Shirim? We live in the first generation in human history where a person can listen to Rav Misha Feinstein, Rav Yakov, Kamatki, RV Hutner, Ra Viker, Miller, Rikut all simultaneously while sitting in traffic and yet sometimes the shear is playing in the background while we're checking emails, answering texts, and wondering why the guy in front of us hasn't moved at the green light. The words can enter one ear and then just leave the other. Not because they're not profound, because they're so available we don't cherish them. And perhaps that's a real legitimate crisis of our generation. Not a Judaism shortage, a Judaism saturation. We don't have too little access to Yiddish. We have such an unbelievable access that it sometimes we forget how extraordinary it is. We become so surrounded by Tyra and that we stop being moved by it. We've heard the words so many times that we've forgotten that they're supposed to shake us. I sometimes think the Yates of the previous generation was distance. And our Yates is familiarity. Nothing kills wonder faster than familiarity. Nothing kills inspiration faster than habit. Nothing turns miracles into just furniture faster than seeing them every single day. And maybe that's the avoida of our generation. Not more Judaism. more attention, more curiosity, more wonder. To stop sleepwalking through mitzvah, to stop treating tila like background music, to stop treating Tyra like just white noise. To stop standing in the middle of miracles and acting like we're standing in line at the DMV. Because for many people, the greatest spiritual danger today is not that we'll abandon Judaism. It's that we'll become so familiar with it that we'll stop noticing it. And the cure is simple. Slow down. Look again. Ask questions. Pay attention. recognize that there's a difference between being observant and being religious. [music] Like Raard Felman likes to say that being observant doesn't automatically make you religious the same way that being religious doesn't automatically make you observant. You can do every single mitzvah you're supposed to do and still not have developed a deep emotional connection to Hashem. And that doesn't mean that the mitzvah you're doing aren't real. Obviously they are. Of course they are. It just means the duvos isn't there. The emotional connection to Hashem isn't there. The aavas, which by the way is a mitzvah dice, isn't there. And that's a tragedy. The mitzvah to love Hashem is not some poetic idea that we're supposed to feel only once in a while. It's something we're supposed to work on, something that we're supposed to develop, something that we're supposed to nurture, we're supposed to become. We can know the we can know the stories. We can listen to the shurim. We can go to Arab. We can sit in the beautiful shaw surrounded by thousands of suvar and somehow through all of it, Hashem can still feel distant because we can do everything and feel nothing. And in a generation that is constantly dulling everything down where everything is becoming faster and louder and more entertaining and somehow more boring at the exact same time, this idea matters more than ever because the goal of Yoshk was never simply to create people who follow a system. The goal was to create people who are connected to Hashem. People who see Hashem, people who feel Hashem, people who love Hashem, people who walk through this world with the sense that there's something much much bigger happening than whatever is appearing on the screen of their phones at that particular time. And maybe that's something we can all work on. Not just to become more observant, to become more spiritual, not just to do more, to feel more, to make sure that in a generation drowning in Judaism, we don't accidentally drown out Hashem. [music]