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This week marks the commencement of the Omer, and we turn our attention toward one aspect of The Human Project: "The Self and Facing Inward."
As famously conveyed by Hillel, "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" Additionally, the German philosopher Martin Buber emphasized the importance of the self, noting that each of our worlds originates with the declaration of "I." Buber contended that all of us are intertwined with the world around us, symbolized by the formulation I- (I dash), but stressing that genuine meeting necessitates the firm anchoring of the individual within their own identity.
The notion of “The Self and Facing Inward” is also represented in prayer, as we often begin our worship with Mah Tovu in which each verse begins, “V’ani…” “I.”
“I enter Your house…”
“May my prayer come to You…”
Thus even as the focus of Jewish prayer is communal, the root experience is personal expression, what Rav Kook called, “the song of the self.” He wrote, “There is one who sings the Song of Self, and within one’s self, finds everything; the full of one’s spiritual satisfaction within one’s own fullness.”
What is at issue here is not narcissistic self-care and is separate from contemporary obsession with the autonomous self. The essence of the matter is that we are each singular beings. Indeed, the foundation of the creation story is that each of us was created in the Divine image.
To begin with one’s self as an aspect of The Human Project is to begin by recognizing our own uniqueness. As we turn toward this truth, we set the groundwork to love our neighbor as ourselves, but we begin by focusing our gaze inward.
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