Understanding

Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev once challenged G-d, “Master of the Universe, You have placed all the earthly temptations before our eyes, while the spiritual pleasures and rewards for following Your will are relegated to the books we study. That is quite unfair! Why not reverse things and fill our senses with an appreciation and understanding of spirituality, and leave all material benefits and pleasures to the library shelves. See, then, how few people will sin!” What does “understanding” mean? There’s an English expression “to grasp an idea”. Just like you can grasp or hold a ball, feeling it and controlling it from every side, your brain can understand , hold and feel an “idea” in the same way. As people, we can understand things we like to eat, do and figure out how to get more of them (this is instinctual and survival stuff). We can also understand nature (biology and physics), the engineering of machines, and different skills. We can also understand people (like I wrote la