Even though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for you, G-d, are with me. ----Psalms 23

Really!!-- The Zohar Vol. 2 pg. 57

In the world at large, if your boss sends you on a mission, he generally stays at the office, while you go off to accomplish the assigned task. But that's not the case when G-d sends you on a mission. G-d comes along.

This is the meaning of the verse in Psalm 127: "If G-d doesn't build your house, your labor is for nothing."

Now you might think that if G-d is going to build your house, why do you have to labor at all? The Psalm is saying that you must labor nonetheless, but if you don't invite G-d into your work, your efforts will be worthless. You will not have the energy to achieve your task. You can choose to build a house; you can haul the bricks and the mortar, but, without G-d Who is the power source, your house will never get built in a meaningful way.

This is what's unusual about our mission from G-d. The One who sends us, joins us in our mission. But if we don't acknowledge His presence in our work and process, then we are powerless to truly succeed.

The daily focus of our life should be all about inviting G-d to join us in the performance of our mission.

A famous story tells about a man who dreamt that he saw his whole life's journey as footsteps in the sand. Sometimes there were two imprints -- his and G-d's. But, during the parts of the trek that were most difficult he saw only one set of footprints. He complained to G-d, "G-d, you promised me that you would always accompany me in my journey. How is it that during the most difficult times in my life you disappeared?" G-d responded, "I have always been with you. The reason why you only see one set of footprints is because during your most difficult times I carried you. Those footprints our mine."

It is especially helpful to remember this in the most challenging moments.

During times of pain in your life have you ever asked, "Why is G-d doing this to me? Why is G-d hurting me?"

There is no answer to that question because it is the wrong question.

This question is based on a perception that there is a G-d, an invisible Being, floating out there in outer space, and you are down here on earth, separate and removed from Him. However, Kabbalah says that there is no such G-d and there is no such you. The true you is the soul and the soul is none other than a part of G-d.

Therefore the real question is, "Why is G-d doing this to an aspect of Himself?"

Now I admit that this question also has no answer, however, I think there is great comfort in knowing that you are not alone in your pain, that G-d is never out to get you, that whatever you are going through G-d completely shares. Remember, whatever G-d puts you through is also what He puts Himself through because you are a soul, an expression of Him.

If you embrace this consciousness then you will draw upon Divine strength and find great courage. You will rise to the occasion, overcome the challenge confronting you and experience the triumphant of the spirit.

We Are Not Alone

No tear ever shed in the history of humanity is without Divine participation. We are never alone, although we can choose to forget that truth by kicking G-d out of our awareness, out of our struggles and challenges.

When we pray to G-d, we are not simply saying, "G- d, remove all these problems and make everything easy. Snap your cosmic fingers make it all better." When we pray to G-d, we're actually consciously inviting G-d into our struggle. In this way we empower ourselves to fulfill our mission in the world.

I think this is one of the most important ideas of Torah and Kabbalah -- we're not alone in our struggle, in our challenges, in our pain. G-d is always with us. G-d is rooting for us all the time.

In Kabbalah the forces of evil are called sitra acher, "the other side." One of the tricks of evil is to try and convince you that G-d is on the other side. You're on one side and G-d is on the other side. He's not on your side. He is against you.

This is a lie. G-d is always on your side. No matter how low you feel you have fallen, G-d is always on your side. To feel this, all you got to do is invite Him in.

A child once asked his father, where is G-d? His father responded, "Where ever you let Him in!"

The teachings of the Torah and Kabbalah focus on letting G-d into your process, inviting G-d into your challenge, and recognizing how much G-d wants to be involved and is involved in your life, because your true inner self is the soul, a ray of G-dliness.

We are incredibly important to G-d. And G-d is always with us. If we don't choose to believe that, then -- although we are important to G-d and He is always with us just the same --we won't experience the joy of that truth.

G-d is never out to get you. G-d is not on another side. G-d is always on your side. G-d has a vested interest in you - because you are a soul, a aspect of Himself. You are not G-d but you are an expression of G-d. Although G-d is beyond you, an aspect of G- d is manifest within you.

G-d is not some magician who ludicrously snapped his finger and created us with no vested interest in what would happen to us. G-d is not some force transcendent of our process, removed from our pain and struggle, stoically looking down at us while we grapple with life in this world.

When you realize that G-d is part of your life as a loving a parent to a child, you will discover your holiness; you will discover your ultimate meaning and significance. When you serve the ultimate, then you'll feel part of the ultimate. And when you realize that you're part of the ultimate, then you will know G-d in every step of your journey.

Start Time: August 24, 2008 10:00 AM EST

You must sign up to attend this event! Please ask how to sign up online....

Class Description

The works of modern science, taken one by one, seem enough to dampen a person's hope for higher meaning. If religion's stock-in-trade is the inexplicable, the coming years don't look like boon times. This is half of the giant paradox, and it's one reason why the average scientist today is probably less religious than the average scientist of 50 or 100 years ago. The other half of the paradox comes from stepping back and looking at the big picture: an overarching pattern that encompasses the many feats of 20th century science and transcends them; a pattern suggesting, to some scientists, at least, that there is more to the universe than meets the eye, something authentically divine about how it all fits together." (What Does Science Teach Us About God?; TIME Magazine, December 28, 1992)

The "Big Picture" picks up where this comment leaves off, by investigating, from a Torah perspective, the essential concepts that allow a person to transcend the everyday, mundane reality, and not only learn to see God within Creation, but learn how to achieve their personal potential so that they can work with God, as a partner, to bring Creation to fulfillment.

He is the author of "PERCEPTIONS", which reaches thousands people on a weekly basis. "PERCEPTIONS", complete with Kabbalistic-based insights and lessons for every day life.

Presenter: Rabbi Pinchas Winston

"Like most second-year law students on the Harvard Law Review, Senator Obama wrote an unsigned student case comment that summarized a recent decision by a state or lower federal court. The piece analyzed a case in which a mother was sued by her child for injuries caused by the mother's negligent driving during her pregnancy. Senator Obama concluded that, in such cases, the Illinois Supreme Court was correct not to allow lawsuits by children against their mothers," said Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt in an email. "He wrote that the best way to protect the health of fetuses was to provide prenatal education and health care to pregnant women - issues he remains committed to today and which he has worked to advance as a legislator and in this campaign."

LaBolt also provided a brief analysis from Cass Sunstein, a University of Chicago law professor who supports Obama.

"Student Obama was acutely attuned to the limits of the judiciary, and of suits between children and their mother, in this sensitive area," Sunstein wrote. "This is a modest and balanced piece that fits easily within the framework of the law at the time."

Outside lawyers who reviewed the piece for Politico also said it was a fairly standard example of the genre, an approving recap of an interesting - and quite mainstream -- state court verdict.

The recent case reviews take a basically "journalistic" approach to the decisions they analyze, said Scott Altman, another professor at the University of Southern California Law School.

Obama approached "what remains a controversial issue in a temperate way," said Altman, who was on the Harvard Law Review a few years before Obama. He noted that Obama's terms were carefully hedged - "may" and "many people think" in place of bold declarations.

"It's a very narrow essay," he said.

The case at issue in Stallman, though, was an interesting one. According to Obama's footnotes, the child's mother, Bari Stallman was involved in a car accident in 1981 with a Clarence Youngquist. Her daughter, Lindsey, was born with severe injuries from the wreck, and so Stallman's husband, acting for the baby, sued both his wife and Youngquist for negligence, hoping to recover damages from their insurance companies.

After a series of court rulings and reversals, the Illinois Supreme Court held that the fetus doesn't have the right to sue its mother. The court warned that allowing a fetus to sue its mother could make them "legal adversaries from the moment of conception until birth."

Obama's article addressed only the narrow question of whether a fetus could sue its mother for negligence. He didn't take on the broader question of the fetus's personhood, or whether it could sue others.

He described cases "involving maternal activities that might be considered intentional or reckless infliction of prenatal injuries on the fetus" as "more difficult," though he wrote that as a matter of encouraging good maternal behavior, giving fetuses the right to sue their mothers remained "ill-conceived."

Fetal rights is, as Obama acknowledged, a charged issue largely because of its connection to the abortion debate. That's a question Obama touched in passing, and from both sides, in his article.

On one hand, he warned that allowing fetuses to sue their mothers could actually lead to more abortions.

"Imposing civil liability on mothers may be as likely to deter the carrying of pregnancies to term as to deter maternal negligence during pregnancy," he wrote.

He was also acutely sensitive to women's rights, and to the consequences of involving civil law in childbearing.

"Fetal-maternal tort suits might entail far more intrusive scrutiny of a woman's behavior than the scrutiny involved in the discrete regulation of the abortion decision," he wrote. "On the other hand, the state may also have a more compelling interest in ensuring that fetuses carried to term do not suffer from debilitating injuries than it does in ensuring that any particular fetus is born."

Obama's article, which begins on page 823 of Volume 103 of the Harvard Law Review, is available in libraries and subscription-only legal databases.