Hashem created the most perfect world. He created animals and humans with mouths, but only the humans were given the ability to use words to express needs and desires, while the other creatures use sounds of some sort to express what they need.
All matter in this world has some form of communication. The trees and the stones, all speak out in some way even if we cannot understand them. After all Hashem created the entire world and everyone needs Hashem.
There is a beautiful song called Perek Shira, where it’s written what praise each one in the universe gives to G-d daily. The animals, the trees, the stars, the day and the night. Everything is constantly thanking Hashem.
And we, humans, who were given the greatest ability to speak and articulate our words, must use our great gift to its fullest capacity.
We, the people, are able to move and speak better than all of the creations in the world. We the Jewish people, were given the highest form of communication and usage of words, since we use the Torah as our guide.
However, since we are so capable and able to do and understand almost anything, we at times tend to forget how fortunate we really are, and why it is that Hashem gave us this tremendous gift.
Most of us work in various jobs in which we use most of our faculties to accomplish that; our speech, our hands and our feet. We work long hours and we are basically busy most of our waking hours.
How many of these waking and productive hours do we praise G-d or even remember our creator, so that we may give back to Him gratitude and make His name known?
At best we pray 3 times a day, usually by rote, and hopefully we think of G-d during these moments. Although habit has it, that we know the prayers by heart, and don’t necessarily concentrate too deeply about the great gifts of speech and health that we were given.
Unfortunately, if someone gets ill or goes through some crisis, they then remember very well who gave us all we have, especially the gift of speech.
Speech is the greatest gift since with our words we can change for the better, or heaven forbid, destroy anything in the world.
Rabbi Nachman speaks at great length about the ability of speaking to Hashem in our own language; about speaking to Hashem as we would to a friend.
Rabbi Nachman in his great wisdom realized that in this most technical and advanced world that is ever changing, it will become harder to reach out to Hashem. It will be hard to connect to Him on a personal level and to remember how grateful we must be every second of the day. Therefore, Rabbi Nachman stressed the point of speech and prayer more than anything else.
In our days we can do and achieve almost anything we wish. The facilities we have at our fingertips today can make anyone forget that G-d is running the show and not some smart computer program or some genius who invented it.
As Jews we are very fortunate that Hashem is always making sure we stay grounded, connected and focused on why we are here in this world.
Hashem makes sure to always send us messages, to remind us to look up, to remind us to look around, and to remind us to look down. Look up at Hashem who gives us all we need every second of the day. Look around at all the people He has sent our way to make sure we do not lead a selfish and purposeless life. And look down and remember we are all just flesh and blood and we will return to the ground after 120 years, and to always remember our place and not boast in all we have.
The more successful we are and the more money and power we have, the more we forget who gave us all that success. Therefore G-d in His love for us and desire that we never go astray, sends us messages daily to remind us to stay on track.
What is so hard about these messages, is that they usually demand of us some form of a spiritual connection and not just physical. Not just to do a good deed for someone, because in a good deed we can also think how great we are that we helped out some poor soul.
But rather what Hashem is sending our way is His desire for us to connect to Him by speech or prayer in order that we don’t get too haughty and full of the power that He gave us.
This Friday marks the 33rd day of the Omer, which is a great day of rejoicing. On that day the holy students of Rabbi Akiva stopped dying. Also, on this special day Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, revealed the Zohar which has the hidden secrets of the Torah inside it, to learn from, especially the secrets of prayer and what wonders it can do for each one of us.
May we use all the wonderful gifts we were given on earth and use them to march forwards till the holiday of Shavuot, when we received the Torah, the greatest gift of all.