Vaeira: Passion: Virtue or Vice?

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Do you ever wish you were more passionate about things? More passionate about life, work, love or God? If so, the treatment recommended by the Manual of Divine Medicine is: Raise your blood pressure! Indeed, it’s all about blood, for blood is literally alive. Blood boils. Blood pumps. Blood warms. Blood is the secret of passion. 

This week we read that God turned water (or cool indifference) into blood (or fiery passion). And the message of this first of the ten plagues for us today – as the year 2013 draws to a close – couldn’t be more clear. 

Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi – yesterday we concluded 200 years since his passing – offers us a fascinating take on the difference between blood and water, which illuminates a fundamental truth about our lives. 

The first plague teaches us that there are two types of things in life: there is the water in our lives – the temporary things that fuel life, and there is the blood – life itself. We are plagued when we confuse the two and invest our passion in the means instead of the end. We free ourselves by recognizing the blood and energy source of our lives, and by becoming passionate about the things that make our very souls pulsate. 

So let us enter that heart of the matter, traverse along the veins and arteries, constructing cells and blood banks, until we learn the secret of passion itself. 

In other words: Let us start a blood drive and turn up the blood pressure.