Just because I'm losing, doesn't mean I'm lost.

Perhaps one of these days I'll change the name of my blog to "All about Noam".

Today we were in the kitchen, I was preparing dinner and Noam, propped up on a chair next to me, was cracking open pistachio nuts quietly to himself. I think I added that detail in for the mothers out there looking for some insight as to how to get dinner prepared with a toddler in your midst.

"I'm a bad boy." He says breaking the silence suddenly.

"What did you say?" I asked him in shock.

"I'm a bad boy." He repeated.

Now I'm not sure where he got this from as we are very careful in our house not to ever say such things but whatever the case, he said it.

"You are not a bad boy. You are a good boy, and sometimes you do things that are not good." I explained.

Judaism says that we are in essence good. We are made up of a body and a soul. Our soul wants to do only good things. Our body on the other hand, is designed in a way that makes us move towards our more animalistic desires. Now that is not to say that the physical world is bad and only spiritual lofty pursuits are good. In fact, the complete opposite according to the Torah.

The goal of this world is to take those mundane, physical things and make them into Holy acts.

It is important for us to decipher who we are versus what we do.

I am a good person and sometimes I make wrong choices. I am not my wrong choices.

Now I definitely believe that our choices make up who we will become but in essence, deep down underneath it all, we are all sparks of Divinity and therefore we are all made up of something that is somewhat 'perfect'. We do have the free will in this world to taint that beautiful gift we were given but that's the only way we can possibly get any reward from any of our good actions. It has to go two ways.

When my father in law passed away recently, I experienced something very profound. We were at the funeral home just prior to the procession and they let the family go in and view the body. To preface, I only realized later that I'm not sure if this is a Jewish custom or not and should have asked a Rabbi first but I'm going to share with you my insights as to what happened.

I was pretty nervous and I think my perception of death has been jaded by Hollywood that I was almost expecting to see something morbid. But that's not what happened at all. I looked over from very far away and all I could see was Zaidy's (Grandpa's) face, his body wrapped until his neck in his son's (my husband's) Tallis (prayer shawl). It was his beautiful face, just like it was a few days earlier when he was living. It was as if a white light was surrounding his face and he looked very much at peace.

Isn't that just so cliche? As I was writing it I thought to myself, how lame. He probably looked so white because he was pale from all the blood draining and the peacefulness was because he looked like he was sleeping.

It was just him, lying there with his eyes closed. There was no white light, no halo, no violin, no angels dancing around his face. It was almost as if he was going to open his eyes and say hello. It didn't' seem real at all. In fact, I think it was the most surreal thing I had ever felt in my entire life. But that wasn't the profound lesson. The profound lesson was the following:

What I was looking at, experiencing, was something we speak about all the time yet have no real way of touching.

For the first time in my life, I was looking at the physical world and the spiritual world all at the same time.

You see, just a couple of days before this moment I was in, I was speaking to Zaidy, laughing with him, and connecting to him. And now I was looking at his body, but 'he' wasn't there.

WHERE IS HE?

WHERE ARE WE?

It shook me to the core and I could only remain standing on my two feet for as long as it took me to run out of the room and find a chair to sit on.

If we are really sensitive to the reality around us, it is very simple for us to find where we are. We know it inside. We don't need some guru to tell us. We need to look deep within ourselves and realize the things we already know are true.

We know we are more than just this body. We know we are something much greater. And we know that just because we can't make huge steps towards moving in that direction, we can still make small steps and they are probably much more real and long lasting anyway.

Just because I'm losing, doesn't mean I'm lost.