I have to admit that when I come to the end of the week on a particular middah, I often feel like I barely got started on it. Some middot just seem to need long-term focus, and gratitude (from last week) is one of those.

Order begins within, but inevitably shows up on the outside. “External disorder may be a reflection of internal disarray,” as Alan Morinis reminds us. Now, as I’m writing this, I’m sitting at a rather cluttered desk in a study that’s not the neatest in the world either. So, what does this say about my internal order?

All of the middot are practical, and order might contend to be the most practical of all. It entails things like putting the car keys back on their hook as soon as you walk in the door, setting your alarm so you get up early enough the next morning, and keeping your desk tidy to eliminate distractions.

Sometimes our days are spoken for without our consent. Today was one of those days. Each teen had an agenda, and I was expected to comply.

As a child I was diagnosed with Nonverbal Learning Disorder (NVLD). One of the clearest indicators of this learning difference was my early inability to process information out of sequence. If my mother told me to put on my shoes and socks I would stare at her blankly; I needed to be told to put on my socks and shoes.

There was an office sign that read “a clean desk is a sign of a disturbed mind.” Anyone who has ever battled with a cluttered desk could smile at that statement. Clutter is something that most people deal with at one point or another. Some people confine it to one room, while other people let it overtake every room in their house.

When I began to focus intently on the Shema earlier this year, I realized I’d have to make some changes to line up with what I was reading, three in particular: I’d have to really practice loving Hashem my God with all my heart, with all my soul, and with all my might.

Judaism's emphasis on order has its roots in the Torah and become a pervasive principle after the Hurban, the destruction of the Second Temple.

There's an old saying that goes, "If the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning is eat a live frog, then nothing worse can happen for the rest of the day!"

This week, in the order of the Jewish calendar, we have the first haftarah of admonition (Jeremiah 1:1─2:3). The Rabbis instituted the reading of special haftarot in the period between the 17th of Tammuz and Tisha b’Av. These are commonly referred to as the haftarot of admonition.

Of all the biblical holidays, only Shavuot – the time of the giving of Torah – lacks a specific date. Instead of giving a month and a day as with other holidays, the Torah tells us to count forty-nine days from the offering of first fruits during Passover. Then on the fiftieth day we celebrate Shavuot.

Do you like to make choices?  Whether you do or not, it seems as though for each of us there is a never-ending stream of options that place demands upon our time and threaten the normal and easy flow of our lives. With the blessings of the information age, come even more options, more choices and a still greater demand upon our lives.

During the last half of December through the month of January, I was recuperating from surgery and was, for the most part, bedridden. To pass the time, I played an online game called cityville. The point of the game was to build a city from scratch. Since I had time on my hands, I started out with a one horse town I named Michaelville.

It is no small thing that the middah associated with the beginning of Pesach this year is seder (order). Drawing from insights I have heard and read from great scholars of our tradition, the general irony of seder in the midst of Pesach has not escaped me.

Life is chaotic, but our souls don’t need to be. The wisdom of Mussar is that we can increase our inward order through practical action in our outward surroundings.

Imagine an emergency situation, where chaos is everywhere and help is desperately needed. Can you imagine someone who is in dire straits helping someone whose life is hanging by a thread?

Not surprisingly, the name for the collection of blessing and davening texts for the Jewish people is the siddur, which comes from the word, seder (order).

Do you ever feel overwhelmed—like you just have too much on your plate and you cannot keep up? Here at First Fruits of Zion, we are always taking on more projects than we can handle, and we talk about having “too many balls in the air.”

In our quest for more order, we are sometimes tempted to take shortcuts to get things done or arrive at our destination more quickly

As we consider our prayerbook, the siddur, as a crucial component of an ordered and prayerful life, remember that it is also the simple prayer of a contrite heart and the proper intention that Hashem desires as well.

G-d must be an engineer. Well, at least I try to tell myself this. We all look at Hashem through the lenses of our own experience.

Every system in the universe has many forces acting on it that have the potential to disrupt and disorganize the original intended order. In the beginning, God pulled His “light” into the universe as the energy of creation and good.

As I write this, it is one day after the Chilean miner's rescue operation has been successfully completed. My heart was pained for months over the plight of these men, who found themselves perilously trapped over two thousand feet below the surface after an accident back in early August.

In my own pursuit of Mussar, I find myself returning to Order more than any other middah. I can think of three reasons for this.

Psalm 113:3 says, "From the rising of the sun until its setting, the name of Hashem will be praised." Truly, as the sun goes about its rising and setting, we see from the Talmudic passage above that there is a set order given to prayer.