Rabbi Akiva Rutenberg - How Significant am I?

[Music] we're about to enter the holiday of rosh hashanah leading up to yom kippur those who have been saying slichod for the past month to all of you we are going to be doing a lot of a lot of prayer and when we pray we are trying to connect with hashem and i think a question that must hit every one of our mind at some point maybe more than some more than others is why is my prayer important why am i important i'm just one person just one guy one girl one person living in queens or wherever you were living one person in the world the seven billion people with much more important people much more influential people god is busier more important things to do why am i so important and it's something that i think holds us back sometimes from connecting to hashem and we know that the real answer to this is hashem is infinite and because hashem is infinite doesn't have a body as we sometimes refer to hashem in the body because that's the only way we can connect but hashem doesn't have a body hashem is infinite and therefore hashem could have relationships with each and every one of us as if we are the only person and we have a concept in the torah bishvili that a person is supposed to say the whole world would have been created just for me but i want to share with you a little metaphor that's actually a real life metaphor that i think we could use to help bring this point home and the example i would use is the sun we know that the sun gives us our energy hashem gives the sun the energy but all the in the rules of teva and the rules of nature all the energy that this world has comes from the sun every blade of grass comes from the sun every energy that we have the eye factor i can talk to you right now is from the sun every calorie we eat everything is from the sun this sun was created to give energy to us here on earth how much bigger is the sun than the earth so i'll be honest with you until very recently i thought it was maybe 20 times bigger maybe 30 times bigger i was shocked to find out that it's more than one million times bigger i'm gonna pause for effect think about this for a moment the sun is a million times bigger than the earth if you take this thought through that means that for every human being in this world there's some energy source up there that's a million times bigger than me giving me energy so if i live on a 50 by 100 piece of property and i have my car and i have my office or i have my place that i work what i do there's something up there one million times bigger that was created just for me and i think if we can think about it this way it's very empowering and it makes us realize the true potential that we all each and every one of us have let alone the entire rest of the milky way and it's we you know science tells us that there's 100 million planets in in the milky way and 100 and 200 billion stars in just in the milky way alone and as far as we know the only human life is right here on this earth but just even thinking a little closer with the sun and the earth directly connected the sun and the earth think about the fact that hashem created something one million times bigger than you to give you energy to give you power and hashem through this inspiration we should go into rosh hashanah and feel the connection to hashem realize how valuable each and every one of us is to god i always tell my students that if it would be needed for every jew every religious jew in new york city to break the shabbos we don't even call it breaking the shabbos for one woman who's 90 years old who's maybe only has a month to live if it was technically necessary for everyone to break the shabbos to save her life for one month we would all be responsible to do it that's the potential that hashem believes we have in that he says we all have in this coming year we should all realize our potential [Music] tuka [Music] you