By the Grace of G-d9th of Sivan, 5741Brooklyn, N.Y

Greeting and Blessing:

This is to acknowledge with thanks receipt of your letter with enclosed photograph, in connection with the visit by Hebrew Academy boys, and your return visit to give a slide show to younger and senior students, boys and girls, at the Academy.

I appreciate very much your thoughtfulness in writing to me about it.

The students, who, as you report, were most attentive and interested, no doubt came away from this experience enriched also with some useful moral lessons. For they are, I believe, aware of the teaching of the Baal Shen Tov, founder of the Chasidic movement that "everything a person hears or sees contains a moral lesson," since everything happens by Divine Providence. Certainly such a development as the space programs and aeronautics in general, provides a great deal of food for thought. To mention one point:

By nature, man has been created as an earth-bound creature without wings to fly in the air. Yet, the Creator has endowed man with an intellect that enables him to transcend his physical limitations and take to the air, and travel even in outer space.

If this is true in the realm of the physical and material, it is certainly true in the realm of the spiritual. Man is composed of a body and soul, whereby the soul is bound to the body during the person's lifetime here on earth. Yet, the soul has been endowed with capacities that enable it to transcend the physical limitations and constraints of the body, and, far from remaining subjugated to it, it has the capacity to rise heavenward, and at the same time elevate the body with it to a higher realm of existence, the realm of the spiritual and eternal, which is rooted in the Ein Sof (The Infinite).

With prayerful wishes for success in your work, and, may I add, success also in spiritual advancement, which is as infinite as outer space,

With blessing,