Terumah: The Sanctuary as the Connection with God's Love

The Torah, Israel, the Promised Land, and the Temple of Jerusalem are the essential elements to reveal God's Presence in the material world. They are parts of the same entity we call consciousness, and they are also means to achieve its purpose. The Torah is God's Master Plan, the Promised Land the material and spiritual space to implement the Plan, and the Temple of Jerusalem our highest knowledge and awareness of God's Love as the level to connect with Him, and in this Unity we fulfill our mission to reveal and proclaim His Kingdom over all His Creation.

With Torah study we learn to know the Creator through His ways and attributes, which we as Israel are entitled to emulate. As our Divine legacy and inheritance, the Torah defines our identity as Jews. We are Jews because the Torah tells us what we are. We have spent hundreds of generations immersed in Torah study just to define for us and future generations, who we are. The result of this long journey is the volumes compiled by the Oral Torah. Ironically, after so many centuries and lifetimes devoted to such monumental task, we still debate what defines the Jewish identity. This indicates that one of the major challenges and endeavors that we have to engage into in the dawn of the Messianic era is to discover and embrace who we truly are based on the definition that the Creator gave us in His Torah.

As long as we don't realize what is our Jewish identity we will never know our purpose in the material world. Knowing or ignoring this identity has determined our fate as individuals and as a Nation. If we are willing to learn from our history, the expected obvious and "logical" conclusion would be to embrace our real identity, though it seems that our common predicament is to rebel against whom we are, and rather assimilate to other "cultures" or lifestyles. The main criticism to non observant Jews is their lack of interest in knowing the Jewish identity. If they, out of individual desire, would inquire about it probably would leave behind what doesn't define who they are. It's interesting to note that in these times thousands of people from all over the world are embracing Judaism as their material and spiritual identity, and this fulfills the prophecies about "the gathering of the exiles" as the descendants of the lost Tribes of Israel, for whom we pray three times a day when we stand before our Father and King.

The Land of Israel is the geographic space in the material world chosen by the Creator for His People to fulfill the destiny according to His will. The Torah describes this Land both as a physical and spiritual place to exercise our identity, because this identity encompasses material and spiritual qualities. Judaism conceives life and the physical world as part of a unity from which nothing is separated, because our destiny is to make both the spiritual and material as means to reveal God's Presence as the Creator of all. This comprises all levels and dimensions of consciousness that must be conducted and guided by God's will, what we call here God's Love as the cause and effect of what we conceive and experience as Love in our human comprehension. The more we discover, experience, learn and share Love, the more we know God's Love.

In this sense, the Land of Israel encompasses all manifest and potential facets of human consciousness under the awareness of God's Love. We have mountains, valleys, deserts, beaches, sea, lakes, hills and plains that represent thoughts and ideals, imagination, introspection, expression, sensitivity, austerity, and character traits that expand or limit the way we conceive life, the world and how we interact with our fellow man. In this sense, we are gifted with a Land that enlarges the human potential in every dimension of intellect, thought, emotions, feelings, passions and instincts. This Land, as a special quality in consciousness, endows us to fulfill God's will. In other words, as long as we do not dwell in it -meaning not living consciousness in its full potential- we are not able to fully manifest God's ways and attributes.

   

The Sanctuary, as the Tabernacle and the Temple of Jerusalem, is also the anchoring physical and spiritual place in which our consciousness reaches the full awareness of the Jewish identity. By realizing God's Love as the Essence of who we are, through the awareness of Love's ways and attributes, we ascend to Jerusalem (the highest awareness of God's Love) and then we will be able to enter the most sacred place in consciousness which is our connection with Him. Hence we pray daily for the reconstruction of Jerusalem, and this process we do only with the help of God's Love. This is how we understand terumah as the elevation process through which we offer our life to God's will. The offerings that we elevate in the Temple are all facets, aspects, traits, qualities and dimensions of consciousness under the guidance of Love as the material manifestation of God's Love (see our commentary on "Parshat Terumah: Elevating Life to Divine Love" in this blog Jan 30, 2011 for more details)

Only Love meets Love, and nothing else. This is how we understand that our offerings must be unblemished and whole, meaning that in them there is nothing but Love: "(…) and have them take for Me an offering [lit. uplifting] from every person whose heart inspires him to generosity (…)" (Exodus 25:2) because when Love inspires us and fills us, generosity follows and our Love meets God's Love: "And they shall make Me a Sanctuary and I will dwell among [in] them" (25:8) and the Torah is the means to establish this Sanctuary: "And you shall place into the ark the testimony, which I will give you." (25:16)

Our Sages debate on the allegorical meanings of every part and utensil of the Tabernacle and compare it to the human body, and all that God created in the seven days of His Creation. With these comparisons they teach us that the Sanctuary encompasses all the elements of the material and spiritual Creation. As an allegory of the human body, it means that all that the body contains must be consecrated to its Creator, and this why we say, "Happy are those who dwell in Your House, they are ever praising you." (Psalms 84:4) After all, we are His creatures and our destiny is to know Him and unite with Him. That's the legacy of the Torah, Israel, the Promised Land, and the Temple of Jerusalem: "Praise the Lord, O Jerusalem; praise your God, O Zion. For He has strengthened the bars of your gates; He has blessed your children within you. He makes peace in your borders, and fills you with the finest of the wheat." (147:12-14)

Mishpatim: Torah's Laws as God's Love

The Giving of the Torah is the most important event in Jewish history as well as in world history. The Torah is the identity and constitution of the Jews because we can't exist without it, and at the same time it contains God's master plan for His Creation. This plan is partially revealed to us as the code of ethics through which we manifest and make tangible God's Love. In this sense, the Torah contains the ethical and moral ground rules and guide lines for humankind aimed to fulfill the Torah's main message for all: "Love your neighbor as you love yourself, [because] I am the Lord."

The ground rules and guide lines of the Torah comprise what it calls Commandments, laws, statutes and decrees, because we need to learn how to walk in God's ways by emulating His attributes as emanations of His Love from where all that is comes to existence. Our Sages refer to statutes as the rules aimed to direct and conduct ourselves as individuals, and to laws (mishpatim) as the rules to relate with each other. We have to understand both as part of the same ethical foundation that God's Love wants for us in order to manifest Love as  our common Essence with Him. 

We also have to be aware that every rule in the Torah must be learned because the purpose of human life is an educational experience based on an empirical approach to the material world. This means that we learn by trial and error, right and wrong, useful and useless, productive and destructive, positive and negative, and we learn this from Nature as the "intelligent design" that some call it in modern times. Our ancestors learned through this process and so do we. Animals also follow through this same pattern, and part of our learning comes from the way they behave and approach their environment. The main lesson we learn from animals is that they seem to understand Love as the Essence that gives life and protects life.

The Creator gave us human discernment to go beyond the obvious "basics" of Love (not obvious to many), and through Torah's educational rules and guide lines (let's never forget that Torah means Instruction) we prepare our consciousness to assimilate God's Love by being and manifesting Love as our Essence and identity. Our Sages explain that the first law presented in the Torah after it was given to Israel is related to how we treat a Hebrew slave, and refer to his bondage not only as servitude but as an educational process. They say that such slaves were men who committed transgressions such as manslaughter and robbery, and had to sale themselves in order to pay for the damages that they could not compensate with money or material possessions. In this context, bondage in the Land of Israel was part of Torah's laws not only as punishment rules but as educational and correcting guide lines for those who knew less and acted out of ignorance. In this same context we must understand the Cities of Refuge and the Levites as the places and persons that teach the children of Israel the ways and means of the Torah.

Let's use an analogy to learn further the rules of the Torah. It is like learning how to drive a car or vehicle. Most countries refer to driving not as a right but as a "privilege", because they consider that a privilege implies not only responsibilities but obligations. Once we are on the driving wheel the rest of the people do not expect less from us, and we are compelled to drive carefully and comply with the universal driving laws and rules. There is a Spanish proverb, "there is no sane man on a horse" because it is presumed that a man behaves different on a horse by the fact that he is not by himself but with something that demands his attention. Hence we learn how to drive by also learning the driving rules. The key words here are ''privilege", "how", "responsibility" and "obligation".

As Jews we have the privilege to be the people of the Torah, which entitle us to learn God's ways and attributes as His Love for us and His Creation, which are how we fulfill His will. This is our main responsibility in order to know who we are and our purpose in life, and we come to know this by learning it. Our learning and knowing led us to respond to the material world, and the ways we respond make us responsible. As a comprising and encompassing process, in this awareness, Torah's Commandments, statutes and decrees as ground rules and guide lines are our ways and means to fulfill our obligations as Jews. In this sense we are naturally compelled and not forced to exercise our true Essence and identity.

There is an old saying, "to whom a lot is given, a lot is expected" and we are aware what the Torah is our Essence and identity as Jews. We know that the Torah is God's Love for Israel in particular and for the world in general, and this means that we are the embodiment of God's Instruction as the messengers and the message for human consciousness as a whole. There is no Love without its ways and attributes, as there is no God's Love without His Torah. We also know this by experience because we are taught and instructed Love since the moment we are born. 

We learn that Love is the Essence of all the Commandments, rules, statutes and decrees, because they all are Love's ways and means. Let's always be aware and mindful that all we are, have and do are meant to be the cause and effect of Love, in the same way that God's Love is the cause and effect of His Creation: "And you shall serve the Lord your God, and He will bless your food and your drink, and I [God] will remove [every] illness from your midst." (Exodus 23:25)

The Final Redemption in Judaism (II)

In the first part of this commentary (Jan 22, 2012 in this blog) we referred to allegorical and concrete definitions of the Final Redemption according to our Prophets and Sages. This time we focus on the dynamics of Redemption in our consciousness. The first question to ask ourselves is, "Am I ready for Redemption?" and maybe before doing it, we may consider other issues prior to "readiness", such as what is the true meaning of it and if we really want to be redeemed. Many of us are comfortable with the material illusions that they chose to live in, and have no interest in changing anything because they are simply happy with their lot, whatever it is. We are referring here to those who are fed up with such illusions, and in their souls, hearts and minds they cry out to live in, with, by and for the Truth we call God's Love, His ways, and His attributes as He wants from us in His Torah. These are the premises to end once and for all our long exile in the darkness of ego's material fantasies and illusions.

We simply can't desire or cry out for true freedom if we have one foot on our illusions and another trying to step in what we imagine as the Messianic era or the Garden of Eden, lost when we chose to live in the material fantasies forged by ego's dream to become another god. This is what we mean when we say that Love doesn't dwell with anything different from its ways and attributes. Let's take an imaginary trip to Messianic times as our Prophets announced for "the end of times", particularly as suggested by Maimonides (Mishneh Torah, Laws of the Kings 12:5):

"In that Era there will be neither famine nor war, neither envy nor   competition, for good things will flow in abundance and all the delights will be as freely available as dust. The occupation of the entire world will be solely the knowledge of God. The Jews will therefore be great Sages and know the hidden matters, and will attain an understanding of their Creator to the full extent of human potential; as it is written, 'For the world will be filled with the knowledge of God as the waters cover the ocean bed' (Isaiah 11:9)"

Basically a world where there will not be "evil inclination" or evil (as the reference that it is) in order to differentiate positive from negative, because goodness will be the only reference. This sounds like free will would be wiped out from consciousness, and this may not sound as "good news" for those who think that freedom is inherently founded on free will, hence the privilege to choose from "good" and "evil". In other words, if we come into this reality redeemed from evil and negativity, we may "miss" them and approach it as a passive, uneventful and ultimately boring reality. This approach is what we have to reconsider in order to fully understand what the Messianic era really means. As we mentioned in the first part of this commentary, we are talking about a complete change of consciousness in which there will not be any trace of the way we currently approach life and the material world. In conclusion, if we still believe that we need dualities, ambiguities, contradictions, and confrontations to feel "free" with a satisfied free will, we are not ready for Redemption as Judaism presents it.

We currently approach life and the material world based on ego's desires and illusions which confront, oppose and even fight anything that is different from them, in particular Love's ways and attributes that invite all of us individually and collectively to unite and harmonize our consciousness, in order to live individual and collective peace. Let's imagine it in a different way. How about eliminating the "good inclination" and goodness as a reference to choose between positive and negative? Imagine the world only with people totally engaged in evil with each other, in a competition to see who is worse than the other in a reality where all is about pain, suffering, destruction, disease, violence and their derivates. Nothing good whatsoever, to the point that there can't be desperation or any other reference to put an end to such predicament, what some may call "hell".

Which "reality" would we prefer? This may sound purely "black" and "white", but actually that is what in our current consciousness we have in order to make the "white" choice, while discarding the "gray" as the way that some "new agers" propose to end all contradictions and ambiguities. As we have said before, "gray" is the forced way to make Love cohabit with its opposites. In the name of the "gray", nations justify the current status quo that is destroying the world. They appease the radical Islamic fundamentalists with the failed motto of "live and let live", and allowing mass murder, oppression and exploitation as part of cultural "differences" and human "diversity". This is the way we allow genocide, corruption, despotism, and totalitarianism.

The questions remain. Are you really fed up with the fantasies and illusions of ego's materialistic approach to life, and truly prepared to embrace Love's ways and attributes as our true Redeemer from the long standing status quo? Are we ready to enter the Messianic era leaving behind what we don't need any more, that actually we never really needed and was there for us only as a reference to choose Love over ego's mirages? Are you ready to engage into the realm of new heights called the knowledge of the Creator, and experience what that really means, which your understanding can't assimilate now? 

The starting point to enter Paradise while living in the material world begins when we individually adopt Love's ways and attributes as our true references to make a place for the Creator to live in and among us, as it was meant to be from the beginning of times. Those times when we made the choice to become a little god who wants to control all at the expense of his own Essence, his own Love. God's Love is our Creator, and such as His Love is our Essence, cause and effect. Once we recognize this, we will be in our way back to Him, and leave behind the illusions that we have created in detriment of our true identity. This is what we have yearned for so many centuries amid the darkness of exile in fantasies and illusions we don't want or desire anymore.

Yitro: Understanding God's Love

We frequently say that our Sages equalize hearing to understanding and seeing to knowing, in order to teach us two levels of perception. Hence, we assimilate the material world through our senses and knowledge through our understanding. In this context, "Yitro heard...", "and Yitro came…" (Exodus 18:1, 5) are two complementary stages that give sense to the fact that thought precedes action. Our mystic Sages say that Yitro is a precondition for the revelation of the Divine Presence in the material world (as it happened in Sinai), and they mention several reasons that we will consider later.

Yitro personifies the process that the children of Israel have to engage in our relationship with the Creator, because we have to hear about Him and understand His Love before we come to Him. This means that we don't need or have to see Him and know Him before we embrace Him. Understanding is the first stage to assimilate knowledge, and in this sense our mystic Sages define the process starting with intellect as the ability to acquire wisdom, followed by discernment as understanding which lead us to knowledge as a bonding experience.

This is a universal process pertaining human consciousness which we also apply in our endeavor to know the Creator. Israel was chosen to experience Him through every sense and level of consciousness during the plagues in Egypt and the split of the Red Sea in order to tell their descendants about the events that changed forever our relation with the Creator. Hence, we first have to hear about their experience with Him so we may come to Him as Yitro did. This is why our Sages consider that Yitro also embodies the convert who comes to Judaism as the true way to return to God, and by true we refer to the discerning process that precedes the knowledge of Him. In this process we Jews are all converts to the Torah as we were in Sinai, because we have to individually pursue this knowledge by first understanding its revealed and hidden messages by God.

Our oral tradition tells us that Yitro renounced idolatry by the time that Moses came to Median fleeing from Egypt, and as a former high priest of idol worship he knew the ways and means of the forces of nature, considered lesser gods by Pagan peoples. This knowledge made him an unequivocal example for other idolaters who want to abandon their cults and serve the will of the Creator. We must understand idolatry as something rather concrete than abstract. Both the Written Torah and the Oral Torah refer to idol worship not as a delusional cult but as something real, because it is based on the belief that the forces of nature have power over life, as it indeed is. The distinction that the Torah makes very clear is that those forces are commanded by the Creator, because they serve His will as it was magnificently proven with the Exodus from Egypt and the miracles that followed. This Exodus had the two-fold purpose of freeing Israel from bondage and oppression, and to make the entire world aware of God's ownership and control of His Creation.

Many of us think that sorcery, necromancy, divination, voodoo and other magic practices belong to the realm of fantasy and exist only in the minds of superstitious people, and that is a mistake. The Torah commands us Jews to reject such beliefs and practices not because they are not "real" but because we owe ourselves to the Creator who chose us to be above the laws of nature, the lesser gods that serve His will. This is what has made us different, and still makes us distinct from other nations: our belief in One and Only God and our relationship also exclusive with Him. Our Sages tell us that Yitro practiced and experienced all kinds of worships related to the forces of nature, and coming to Sinai to recognize the sovereignty of the Creator was a one of the conditions for Israel to receive the Torah.

In our times, primitive idolatry joins modern idolatry as ego's materialistic fantasies and illusions named addiction to fashion trends, "pop" and "light" culture, drugs, vanity, and enslaving lifestyles bound to consumer's society. Such idols seem to be harder to abandon than slavery in Egypt, and ego as the modern Pharaoh appears as the absolute and unbeatable ruler of all levels of consciousness. Becoming the contemporary Yitro seems to be near to impossible as long as we don't understand God's Love and come to His ways and attributes as the redeeming forces that are the true rulers of our consciousness.

Our total freedom starts when we hear and understand the voice of God's Love as our true Essence and identity. When we do it, our own Love puts in motion the connection with its source, which is Divine Love: "And the Lord came down on Mount Sinai... and the Lord called to Moses to the top of the mountain, and Moses went up" (19:20) because He comes down to call our understanding of His Love to come up to the highest level of our consciousness to meet Him, and this level becomes our knowledge of His Love.

Yitro represents our awareness that no matter how "real" ego's fantasies and illusions may be in what we believe, think or feel with what we possess or are addicted to, they are temporary vanity and futility that sooner or later will either change or end, if they don't destroy us beforehand. We have to be experienced practitioners of materialistic fantasies and illusions up to the point to become as experts as high priests of idolatry, and in the full awareness of their futility we can understand that only Love works wonders and miracles capable to bring us back to the knowledge of God's Love as our One and Only Creator and true Source of Life. Let's awaken to our discernment as understanding of God's Love to embrace Him as our Creator, Redeemer, and our true freedom.

Love and Life as Cause and Effect

Let's summarize some of the principles that we present in "God as Love" as inherent to the soul of Judaism.

1- God's Love is the cause and effect of His Creation, and in our finite and limited understanding we are able to conceive the Creator through what we perceive as His Creation. What we make out from the Creation is our creation and not His. This is important to remark because many people "blame" God for the choices and actions that we make and do instead of taking full responsibility for the consequences of our deeds. We have learned long time ago that we, as most of animal species, are designed to live by caring for each other as the premise to survive in the material world, and we also know that this "caring" is nothing but Love. This is the real and tangible Truth, not for those who know it but deny it, reject it, and even fight against it. How is this possible? Why some of us can deny something as evident and obvious as Love, our true Essence and identity? 

We probably must ask the question in a different way. Why some selectively acknowledge and experience Love in certain aspects of their lives --with family, close friends, beliefs or ideologies-- and not in other circumstances? Like the people who are kind with some and cruel with others who don't represent a threat or danger for them, as it happened with Germans and Jews in the first half of the XX century. What is the root of this irrational selective hatred? Is it ideology? Is it mental illness? Is it possible to submit Love to ideology? Should we call insane those who "love" their families while hating others irrationally? These people hate at the expense of Love in the same way that some kill at the expense of life. We need to be alive in order to kill, as we need to have Love in order to be able to hate because Love is the Essence that sustains life, as the material manifestation of God's Love in His Creation.

2- Love does not cohabit with anything different from its ways and attributes. In this sense we define Judaism as "the ethics of Love", because the Written Torah and the Oral Torah, both as one, contain the ways to completely fulfill the cornerstone of Judaism: "Love your neighbor as [you love] yourself, [because] I am the Lord." (Leviticus 19:18) and there are ways and attributes to love our fellow human beings that we learn from God by our awareness of His Love in His Creation. It is fundamental to know and experience God's Love in order conceive and approach our Love in the material world. We love because of God's Love, and we do it emulating the way He loves us and His entire Creation. This explains that the goodness we pursue for ourselves individually must be the same goodness that we pursue for others. This includes the Talmudic warning that we must not do to others what we consider unpleasant to us, which implies a direct contradiction to doing good for our sake and simultaneously doing something unpleasant to others, as it happened by Germans against Jews and others during the Nazi regime.

3- Love is the awareness of our connection and relationship with God. The more we are aware and mindful of God's Love in His Creation, the more we know Him and the more we love Him. The more we think, feel and act in Love's ways and attributes, the more we are connected to God. The term "Commandment" in Hebrew literally means "connection", and our Sages explain that we fulfill God's Will (His Commandments) as the means to be connected to Him. This makes perfect sense because by our good actions we manifest our closeness to Him. In this context, doing the opposite is to separate from Him, and this is what we mean when we say that Love does not cohabit with anything different from its ways and attributes. The Creator is always with us, regardless what we may believe, think, feel or do, because we are creatures emanated from Him; and it is us who make the choice to "separate" from Him.

3- Love, as the material manifestation of God's Love, is our true Essence and identity. In this awareness and realization, Love is also the ways and means to redeem our consciousness from the negative approach to life and its negative results that we see in the world. The Creator endowed us with free will for us to experience real and total freedom, and in this knowledge we are entitled to make positive choices in order to harvest positive effects. God is not responsible for our actions, we are. If we know what Love is, then we also know our true freedom and Redemption. Let's be mindful that it is up to us, individually and collectively, to redeem ourselves and fix the damage we have caused with a negative approach to life and the world. This is our responsibility and not God's. In this sense, it is our duty to manifest the Messianic era and the Redemption that our Prophets announced.

Maimonides and other Jewish Sages share the same view about "the end of times". As we often say, we were responsible for the destruction of the First and Second Temples of Jerusalem, and it is also up to us to build the Third Temple as a final and perpetual place in our Land as well as in our consciousness. In the same way that we have allowed negative thoughts, emotions, feelings, passions and instincts in our consciousness, we are perfectly capable to direct them in a positive direction and purpose, which are Love's ways and attributes as cause and effect of goodness. Ego, along with all aspects of consciousness, is a driving force that also must be directed in Love's ways and attributes.

4- Love is inherent to life, and life is inherent to Love. This principle is derived in a deeper way from the first mentioned above. In the same way that God's Love conceived us, we are materially conceived by, through and for Love as our Essence and identity. We know that life is the purpose of Creation. In Jewish liturgy we recite every morning "You [God] are the life of all worlds" and in our consciousness of being alive we must say "the world was created for me", as our Sages teach us. We must approach life as we approach Love, as Essential as simple, because there is nothing complex about Love. We care for each other just because this is part of how we love. Love defines itself by its ways and attributes which all are about goodness.

Our Sages relate simplicity to humbleness and complexity to haughtiness, and we can conclude that the simpler we are the easier we approach life. The less we have to worry about what we believe, feel or possess, the easier we live. People too attached to their complexities in every level of consciousness find more difficulty to adapt to simpler conditions or environments. Humbleness and simplicity are the vessels for God's blessings which are His Love. Love flows easier with simplicity, and usually is either rejected or conditioned by complexities, which are mostly derived by ego's materialistic fantasies and illusions.

Beshalach: Love as the Meaning of Life

One of the fundamental principles that the Torah teaches, and the book of Exodus in particular, is the fact that all emanates from Creator and is sustained by Him. Understanding this in a deeper level means that we are His invention and not all the way around. This also implies that in order to truly know who we are, first we have to know Him. The Hebrew Bible and our Sages define the way to do it by what is called Judaism, which is the most important contribution to humankind since its beginnings. Human life without a positive direction for the sake of positive effects does not make much sense. Without a true meaning there is not point, though most of us in this world live regardless true meaning or not. Life seems to be a random phenomena, and being born in a particular place and culture determine most of one's destiny, making look "luck" as the deciding factor. Such existentialist approach ends when we find and experience a true meaning in life, and this meaning is Love.

We begin to understand and to know life and its meaning when we recognize Love and not ego as the true driving force in life. This is the starting point to know the Creator, because everything including Love comes from Him and through the awareness of Love we start knowing His Love. Exile under the darkness in Egypt was a negative experience from which our forefathers cried out for a true meaning in life, a valuable purpose to exist in the material world, but the real point of exile and darkness is to lead us to our Love and God's Love: "And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to cause it to lead them on the way and at night in a pillar of fire to give them light, [they thus could] travel day and night." (Exodus 13:21) to teach us that we exist for the sake of God's Love. Teaching and directing ego in Love's ways and attributes is not an easy task, and we have learned that the interaction between Moses (our highest knowledge of the Creator) and Pharaoh (ego) was not precisely a "piece of cake" as the Torah tells us.

Ego demands a minimum amount of control over most aspects of consciousness, and the lack of it generates conflict and confrontation between what is the positive right thing to think, desire, feel and experience, and ego's fantasies and illusions that not necessarily aim for positive and enhancing purposes. Ego voices its fears when is not in control, and only in its silence our Love and God's Love can lead: "The Lord will fight for you, but you shall remain silent." (14:14) and our awareness of His Love must lead every aspect of consciousness (the children of Israel): "The Lord said to Moses, 'Why do you cry out to Me? Speak to the children of Israel and let them travel.'" (14:15) and God's Love leads us when our own awareness of Love also leads us.

Once we fully experience the knowledge of God through His Love, we realize that it has been ever since His Creation: "The Lord will reign to all eternity." (15:18) because He has been, He is, and He always will be; and we assimilate this knowledge when we follow His ways and emulate His attributes: "And He said, If you hearken to the voice of the Lord, your God, and you do what is proper in His eyes, and you listen closely to His Commandments and observe all His statutes, all the sicknesses that I have visited upon Egypt I will not visit upon you, for I, the Lord, heal you." (15:26) because when the awareness of Love leads our consciousness there's no room for darkness or negativity.

Again let's be mindful that ego must be a complementary driving force along with Love, and not opponents of each other. One of the most negative effects of ego's feeling or sense of lack are doubt and uncertainty, especially if we don't believe or feel that Love is our true Essence and identity that sustains us since our birth until our death: "He named the place Massah [testing] and Meribah [quarreling] because of the quarrel of the children of Israel and because of their testing the Lord, saying, 'Is the Lord in our midst or not'?" (17:7) When Love is not in our midst, what --if not Love-- takes over? From these verses our Sages relate Amalek to doubt and uncertainty, which we must vanish from our connection and relationship with God's Love, and also in our individual and collective experience with Love in the material world: "The Lord said to Moses, 'Inscribe this [as] a memorial in the book, and recite it into Joshua's ears, that I will surely obliterate the remembrance of Amalek from beneath the Heavens.'" (17:14)

As we mentioned above, we are God's creatures and we depend solely from His Love. In this context we indeed live as the result of a miracle from God: "Then Moses built an altar, and he named it 'the Lord is my miracle'. And he said, 'For there is a hand on the throne of the Eternal, [that there shall be] a war for the Lord against Amalek from generation to generation." (17:15-16) We are always in the hands of the Creator, and in the same way that His Love sustains us, His Love also fights our wars against ego's fantasies and illusions. We must pursue and achieve our highest knowledge of the Creator in order to vanish doubts and uncertainties that only ego makes us feel with its false sense of lack, because when we are fully aware of Love in all levels and dimensions of consciousness we never lack.

The more we live in Love's ways and attributes, the more we are close to God's Love. Our inner enemies are the negative traits and qualities that deny Love as our true Essence, identity and purpose in life, and they disappear when we are completely aware of God's Love as the cause and effect of His Creation.

The Desert as a Field of Life

The experience of our ancestors in the Sinai desert after the Exodus from Egypt set a principle for us, individually as Jews and collectively as a Nation. We understand their journeys in the desert as a transition process between slavery in Egypt and freedom in the Promised Land, darkness and Light, exile and Redemption, ignorance and knowledge. It seems to be a process in which there are many elements involved with total freedom as the common purpose. Life itself encompasses a similar process as the vehicle that supposes to be the means and the end for freedom. We have said many times that freedom is inherent to life in the sense that freedom is the means to experience it in a meaningful way. For this we have to define "freedom" and "meaningful". Even though both terms seem to complement each other, they may mean something different depending on who defines them and this also depends on the circumstances and the borders within we live.

We also have said often that Love is what gives sense and purpose in life, while the opposite of Love's ways and attributes deny any sense nor purpose in life. With these premises in mind we are going to approach "desert" and "journey" as well as "transition" and "purpose", among other terms relevant in the message that we aim to convey here. The desert is a place related to barrenness, lifelessness and something unable to sustain life. We can't live in a desert as a dwelling place unless we bring with us what we are going to need there in order to survive. The material world offers more suitable places, and the last place we want or need to go is a desert, except if we can find in it an oasis or an enlarged version like the one called Las Vegas. 

It's amazing what ego's materialistic desires can achieve to the point of building an entertaining city in the middle of the desert dedicated to fantasies and illusions. It sounds like defying the whole point that the Torah wants to teach us about Israel's journeys in the desert, which was to be closer to the Creator and not closer to ego's desires. The desert is the absence of anything that invites our consciousness to desire or to possess, simply because there is nothing there. We leave behind the accessories for a life in comfort in order to find something that gives meaning to any possible material asset to experience life in the best conceivable way. The desert, the land of nothing, the non-having and non-desiring place becomes the setting as a precondition to start knowing the One who created all and owns all. 

As we reflect on this, we start realizing that we humans do not really own anything, neither in the material world nor in the spiritual world. This is easy to confirm this when we realize that we don't take with us what we have when we die. In other words, we must realize that the only "possession" is our consciousness as long as we live with it in freedom. This is one of the lessons about knowing the Creator when we "meet" Him in the wilderness of Sinai. We can stand before Him when our consciousness is free from the bondage of material illusions we call "possessions" and other fantasies created by ego's desires.

Our mystic Sages say that we have to empty our consciousness in order to make space for God's blessings, which are His ways and attributes for us to experience and manifest in what we think, feel, speak and do. This conclusion is based on the Talmudic quote, "The Creator doesn't dwell with one who is full of himself", just because he leave no space for Him. Hence, the main obstruction to approach Him is the way we conceive ourselves individually, and what we do with our life according to such conception. Here we start to make the classical existential questions related to who or what we are, why are we here, etc. In the answers we suppose to find the whole point.

Most people believe that we are the result of our circumstances, and we act according to them without objections because "that's all there is". If we are not happy with that, we try as much as we can to change things and turn our circumstances according to what or who we think we are or "should" be. The other day an Israeli newspaper mentioned a new book of about a religious character whose life and deeds are based on legends that have been modified or transformed according to the interests of a particular religion. This book pretends to give a different perspective or vision about this particular character based on other legends and the author's own interpretation of them. He is basically trying to change a myth with his own version of the same myth, a lie from another lie. Most of us do the same regarding beliefs, customs, habits and views about things and people, and we are (not all of us) changing throughout our lives according to the times and circumstances.

We must assimilate the "desert" as a state of consciousness in which we make a space to meet the Creator. In order to enter this space we must reflect on our needs in every aspect of life, and come to the awareness that all our needs are fulfilled by God. If we don't realize this, we are back into the bondage of an approach to life that commands us to live according to ego's "rules of the game" or "fair play" in the fields of the material world. This is when we rather return to the consciousness of "Egypt" than pursuing a consciousness of real freedom in the fields of God. We have to embark in a journey in a desert with many stops and turns until we empty all levels of consciousness in order to let God fill them with the Essence of who we truly are. 

In this process God's Love is fully revealed to us in direct proportion to the space we allow for Him in our consciousness. The more we experience Love and manifest Love, the more we are able to transform darkness into Light. Our Sages say that a good deed is rewarded with the opportunity to do another good deed, and it makes sense because once we see the Light and hold it in our hands we are able to illuminate dark places. They also refer to the light of fire as something that we give or share without losing it, as it also happens with Love's ways and attributes. We give Love without losing it. We understand Love as something endless and infinite as God's Love, because it is our Essence and identity as well as the source and sustenance of life.

We realize this when we entrust ourselves to leave behind the mirages, fantasies and illusions of what we are not, and the "desert" is the empty space in our consciousness where this endeavor takes place. Here is where we stand before our Creator, who tells us that we are His and belong to Him, not to ego's illusions. Not to Egypt, not to Vegas, not to consumer society, not to "light" culture, not to vanity and glamour, not to futility, not to a meaningless life. In the desert we meet our Creator and in the desert we build a Sanctuary for Him, a place in the highest level of consciousness in which both our highest awareness of Him and our highest awareness of our connection to Him are the main leading and driving forces to approach life and the material world as emanations of God's Love.

In order to understand and assimilate the knowledge of life and the world, first we have to know their Creator and His Love; and we do this through Love as our common bond with Him. Let's leave behind our bondage to the material illusions fabricated by ego and engage in our individual inner journey to the place where only the Truth of who we are dwells, and let's dwell always in this Truth. This is Israel's legacy, inheritance and destiny as the state of consciousness in which God's Love fills every space of who we are as His children and as His chosen people, because we chose back to embrace Him as our Father and our King. This is our true Essence and identity, either in the desert or in any other place, to turn the desert into a field of life as He conceives it for us.