A Jewish Concept?
"And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing or situation -- some fact of my life -- unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment.
Nothing, absolutely nothing happens in God's world by mistake. Until I could accept my alcoholism, I could not stay sober; unless I accept life completely on life's terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and in my attitudes."
Does anybody really believe such things besides those crazies in AA?
[The Baal Shem Tov taught that] Divine providence governs every minute creation… even a fallen leaf that has been tossed over and over by the wind… or a bit of straw which someone used when thatching a roof some years ago…. To move them from one place to another… a stormwind breaks out, shaking heaven and earth in the middle of a warm sunny day and brings to fulfillment the Divine providence that governs this small stray leaf and old wisp of straw.
The Rebbe Rayatz, Likkutei Dibburim, Vol. 1, p. 164, p. 177 in English.
The movement of a single blade of grass in the depths of a forest, on a stately mountain, or in a deep valley where man has never passed... to its right or to its left... throughout its entire life is determined according to Divine providence.
G-d, blessed be He, has decreed that a particular blade of grass will live for a specific number of months, days, and hours, and during the duration of this period it will turn and bend... a certain number of times....
Furthermore, the movement of this particular blade of grass affects... the creation in its entirety... [allowing] G-d's intent in the creation to come to fulfillment.
The Rebbe Rayatz, Sefer HaMaamarim -- Kuntresim, Vol. II, p. 740.
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Is this a picture of the Rebbe Rayatz? if so can you tell us a little more about who he was, what time period he lived and what he did. (I don't think that that could be a picture of the Baal Shem Tov...)
His name was Yosef Yitzchok, the sixth Rebbe. He had three daughters and no son. His son-in-law, the Rebbe, succeeded him upon his passing in 1950. He had moved to New York from Poland in 1940 and transplanted the Lubavitch movement to America. Before Poland, he was in Latvia, and before that in the movements native land of Russia. He was the only child of the fifth Rebbe who told him to write a lot. As such he was very prolific.
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