Parshat Vaeira: The Regency of Love in Life

Our Sages teach that all the Divine Names mentioned in the Torah represent a particular attribute with which the Creator relates to His Creation: “I appeared (lit. was seen) to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as the Almighty God, but My Name YHWH I did not become known to them.” (Exodus 6:3).

Regarding YHWH, they indicate that it is related to abundant loving kindness and compassion. Hence we can understand it as Divine Love that sustains, relieves and redeems us from the bondage of negative trends in human consciousness, triggered by ego's materialistic fantasies and illusions.

As we have said often, the essential message in this blog -- God's Love -- is to conceive (from our human consciousness) the Creator through His Love, and relate to Him also through Love. The message is quite simple. If Creation is an emanation of God’s Love, therefore the Essence of Creation is also His Love. Such as we must conceive God's Love and relate to it.

It is also written that we humans were created at His image and likeness, thus we must understand our human identity as and emanation of His Love and relate to our Creator through Love as our common bond with Him.

This is the context in which we have to understand “And I will take you to Me as a people, and I will be a God to you, and you will know that I am the Lord your God, who has brought you out from under the burdens of Egypt.” (6:7).

God’s Love summons us as our Redeemer simply because He is our Creator. He is the only One we have to know in order to understand who we are in His Divine Plan.

“Moses spoke thus to the children of Israel, but they did not hearken to Moses because of shortness of breath and because of hard labor.” (6:9)

When we achieve higher consciousness, and realize the message presented above, we become the Moses of our own awareness. Thus our purpose is to gather every aspect of consciousness (the children of Israel) and convey this message to them. This task is extremely difficult when these aspects are subjugated to the negativity of ego’s materialistic demands (“shortness of breath” and “hard labor”).

“(…) the Lord spoke to Moses, saying: ‘I am the Lord. Speak to Pharaoh everything that I speak to you’. But Moses said before the Lord: ‘Behold, I am of closed lips; so how will Pharaoh hearken to me’?” (6:29-30)

Here we see the dynamics of the Divine Plan when we have to fulfill the will of the Creator. He is the One that rules His Creation, and He shows the way to walk before His Love as the true sovereign of all dimensions of consciousness, ego included.

It is essential to realize that the task to harmonize our consciousness starts with directing our ego, because it is the most powerful force in human life. As we mentioned in our previous commentary on parshat Shemot, Pharaoh (ego) does not recognize any other power besides him. Hence the whole process of the Exodus from Egypt is about teaching Pharaoh who is the real God in our life.

When we realize God’s Love as our Essence and identity, He is the One who speaks to us and to our ego when we cry out to be released from darkness and return to Light. But sometimes even if we are aware of God’s Love in our lives we don’t fully believe that He can subjugate and direct our basic human driving force. Indeed ego is a powerful ruler hard to be dominated, even by Love.

“The Lord said to Moses, ‘See! I have made you a lord over Pharaoh; and Aaron, your brother, will be your speaker’.” (7:1)

In this verse the appearance of Aaron as the complementary quality to fully embrace God's Love is clearly indicated. Our awareness of God (represented by Moses, our teacher) is indeed the natural ruler over ego, and it is our constant connection with the Creator (represented by Aaron, the High Priest) that executes this action (see commentaries on the book of Leviticus in this blog).

We have said before that Moses and Aaron represent two aspects of the highest awareness of God’s Love in our consciousness. We also learned that in Jacob’s final blessings to his children three dimensions of Israel’s identity were defined.

Joseph became the Birthright, Levi the Priesthood, and Judah the Kingship. Joseph encompasses Israel’s inheritance and legacy which are God’s Love in humankind manifest through Israel. Levi represents the spiritual connection with God’s Love as the highest awareness of Him in our consciousness. Judah represents the material manifestation of God’s Love in the physical world.

The portion continues with seven of the ten plagues that afflicted the land of Egypt in the process of making God’s Love the One and only Ruler over Creation, and the portion ends with ego’s obstinacy to give in to Love’s ways and attributes as the true conductors of life:

“And Pharaoh saw that the rain, the hail, and the thunder had ceased; so he [Pharaoh] continued to sin, and he strengthened his heart, he and his servants. And Pharaoh's heart was hardened, and he did not let the children of Israel go out, as the Lord had spoken through the hand of Moses.” (9:34-35)

Once again we are reminded of the power of ego in our consciousness and the struggle that we face to subdue it to Love as the key to redeem ourselves from the bondage of materialism in this world.