Is ordinary daily life less holy than a life devoted only to spiritual pursuits?

Rabbi Landau teaches that “Hashem doesn’t want your holiness. He wants your plain, regular life.” In his words, “the holiest life is the one closest to the regular life.”

He explains this with the story of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, who spent twelve years in a cave with pure holiness and pure Torah and nothing else. When he came out and saw people farming, working and living normal lives, his eyes burned the world. How could people be busy with this when there was holiness to chase? A voice from heaven sent him back into the cave, because he was going to destroy the world.

Why? “Because Hashem didn’t ask for the cave. He asked for the field, the marketplace, the kitchen, the struggle, the daily life. That’s the holiness.”

Rabbi Shimon went back for twelve more months. When he came out again, he could free the whole world from judgment, because now he understood that “to Hashem, the regular life was never less holy than the cave.”

Going deeper: Rabbi Landau's teaching, level by level

Surface claim

Hashem wants a person's regular life, not an escape from it. Work, family and routine are where holiness is asked for.

Fear, vulnerability, or tension

Is my busy life a waste of spiritual time?

Rabbi Landau addresses the feeling that the marketplace and the home are a distraction from holiness. Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai felt this when he left the cave, and Heaven told him he was wrong.

What may be behind it

In A Soul at Peace, Rabbi Landau writes that the purpose of creation is for Hashem to have a home in this lower world: not to lift the world up and away, but to bring Him into it.

Deepest human truth

To Hashem, the regular life was never less holy than the cave. The cave gave Rabbi Shimon the eyes to see it, but the purpose was always the field.

More questions from this teaching

• Why was Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai sent back into the cave?