Once again, upstate NY summer (and summers in many areas of the northeast) have been upstaged by smoke from Canadian wildfires coming our way. The blurry haze, the eerie yellowish/orangey sky colors, the clouded horizons and shrouded skylines all diminish our ability or desire to stay outdoors, with the days of heavier particulate matter making it dangerous to be outside for long.
This 5786/2026 the haze from Canada coincides with the week of Shabbos Chazon. The Shabbos before Tisha B’Av is known as Shabbos Chazon, named for the opening word of its Haftorah. But Chassidus sees this Chazan (Vision) with a twist: This Shabbos, says a Chassidic teaching, each Jew(‘s soul) is show a spiritual vision of the Third Temple!
Amidst all this blur of hazy smokiness, it’s Shabbos Chazon this weekend, the Shabbos of Vision, clear, crisp & pure, that we look longingly toward, not one that stings the eyes, a refreshing (in)take, that doesn’t gag our throat, a view that’s beyond our current clouded and shrouded horizons!
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The Friediker Rebbe, Rebbe Yosef Yitzchak, speaks of a spiritual air purification system. There are too many spiritual impurities in the atmosphere, and there are things we can do to help cleanse and purify the air/atmosphere/environment around us. This effort was somewhat akin to a spiritual environmental protections act, and remedial efforts to improve the atmosphere and the air we breathe.
This hazy stuff from Canada is way too big for any person or even muncipality to handle, this kind of thing has to be better dealt with at its source, as a preventative protective measure. But it serves as a message for us to remind us of the damaging toxicity that can persist and travel for hundreds of miles, that can keep whole major cities in thick polluted smog. The air we breathe is too precious, too all-embracing, to allow it to become this bad.
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