Remember I promised, "Give me one minute and I'll give you cosmic consciousness"? Well here it is—the entire story of the cosmos in 1,2,3.

You see, the cosmos is best understood as a story. If you just look at the whole thing all at once, it's totally paradoxical. Take it as a story and somehow everything that's so crazy about it starts to make sense.

The story is about Shalom and it goes 1,2,3:

Step one is before there is anything. And before before. No, that's not B3, that's the Ohr Ein Sof—a.k.a the Infinite Light. Total Light that knows no space or time, within which anything and everything could happen and does happen but is totally meaningless since everything else could also happen. It's infinite, see.

That's not Shalom, because there's nothing to make Shalom with. There are no real things. Just nothingness. One.

Step two is a world. A finite, neatly-bounded and closed, not-so-much-light-but-a-lot-of-darkness world. Now there's more than one. There's the Infinite Light and there's that which the Infinite Light generates—namely, a world. And in that world there's a whole cacophony of stuff. A lot of it is in harmony, but some—mainly anything to do with human consciousness—is in total discord. That's definitely not Shalom. That's two.

Step three is Shalom. The world makes Shalom with it's source, the Infinite Light and the Infinite Light shines through the world that it generates.

But hold on—how is that possible? The Infinite Light is all about infinite and the world is all about bounds and limitations! The Infinite Light is all about light, transparent truth the real reality and the world is all about darkness, hiddenness and facade! The Infinite Light is all about nothingness and the world is all about somethingness!

The trick is in the letter shin—that tells you to look at the Source of All Things and discover that the infinite and the finite, light and dark, nothingness and somethingness are all nothing more than dual modalities of a single truth. That single, all-uniting truth is the number three. It is G‑d's name. It is Shalom.

"The Torah was only given," say our sages, "to make Shalom in the world." Every mitzvah you do makes Shalom between another chunk of this world and the Infinite Light. Each neshama enters the world with a mission to accomplish, to zero in on those nodal points of discord and reconnect them to their source, so that they achieve denouement, resolution, harmony—a.k.a. Shalom. Together, we've got the entire cosmos into a single symphony orchestra with the Infinite Light at the conductor's podium. Let it be now!

Which all goes to teach one simple thing: Next time you get in a snarl with your wife/husband/boss/employee/rabbi/congregant/kabbalist/kabbalistically-challenged nebuch—just remember that, yes, this is the way the world was meant to be: challenged. Peace is not when there is no one but me. Peace is when there is an other, in his/her own separate world, with his/her own separate consciousness, entitled to his/her own separate opinions that really get on my nerves—and nevertheless, we are still in love.