In our hands, because in the same way that our negative behavior takes our hands to do and experience harmful thoughts, hurtful emotions, and destructive passions, also with our hands we rectify and enhance our deeds and actions under the guidance of Love’s attributes. As we said in “God as Love”, Love is the catalyst to transform and refine the negative traits, conceptions and habits when we live under ego’s dictatorship.

This transformation starts when we are able to see the potential goodness, righteousness and virtues of our thoughts, emotions, feelings, passions and instincts; the beauty we can embrace when we live in Love’s ways: “If you see among the captives a beautiful woman, and you desire her (…)” (21:11) because the same emotions, feelings, passions and instincts that we experience negatively such as depression, sadness, anger, greed, indolence, etc. we also can experience the opposite when Love fills all of them. We start doing it with our own life, and once we are strengthened with the complete awareness of God’s Love in our consciousness we help those in our immediate surroundings, our loved ones including our fellow Jews: “You shall not see your brother’s ox or sheep straying, and ignore them. [Rather,] you shall return them to your brother.” (22:1) we must not be indifferent to our brother’s ego’s lower desires and passions (their strayed “ox” and “sheep”).

Regarding the issue of gender identity, we are by birth endowed with two polarities, male and female, that we are summoned to develop and direct under the Commandments that the Creator gives us in His Torah, the Commandments of God’s Love for Israel and His Creation. These two polarities must coexist in a working and purposeful harmony. We know that we all strive to balance them the best way we can in order to live individually as well as collectively in harmony. Both polarities, as well as the rest of our levels and dimensions of consciousness, must be guided and directed by Love’s ways and attributes and not to be led strayed by ego’s fantasies and illusions. Masculine and feminine are the two fundamental principles of material creation, and we have to “dress” them with their own respective inherent traits and qualities, in order to cultivate them as the enhancing complementing energies that keep the balance of our material existence: “A man’s attire shall not be on a woman, nor may a man wear a woman’s garment because whoever does these [things] is detestable to the Lord, your God.” (22:5)

The ethical lessons continue in this portion, and compassion among them as one of the essential ways and attributes of Love: “You shall send away the mother, and [then] you may take the young for yourself, in order that it should be good for you, and you should lengthen your days.” (22:7) and remark that the Commandments (the rational and the supra-rational as well) are given for us to refine and enhance our individual and collective lives, as ethical and moral principles that ensure a life dedicated to justice, peace, and happiness for all, and not simply to please the Creator. After all, “If you sin, how have you affected Him? If your transgressions multiply, what do you do to Him? If you are righteous, what do you give Him? What can He possible receive from your hand? (Job 35:6-7)

Our Sages say that even if (God forbid!) He is not with us, we have to live by the truth of justice and righteousness for our own individual and collective sake. In this sense, life is a matter of ethics in order to coexist and survive as loving human beings and not as wild beasts. We are talking about the ethics of Love in His ways and attributes, that we must preserve and protect by being and manifesting Love as our identity: “When you build a new house, you shall make a guardrail for your roof, so that you shall not cause blood [to be spilled] in your house, that the one who falls should fall from it [the roof].” (Deuteronomy 22:8) In the process of building Love’s values in our consciousness (the house) we have to make them prevail in every aspect of what we are and do, thus we guard and protect ourselves from falling down into negative illusions that end up destroying the foundations of Love’s ways and attributes by letting the illusions take over our consciousness, and bringing disgrace to what we consider the most cherished asset of all.

We must walk in the ways of the blessings of Love, God’s Love in our consciousness, and separate from the curses of a loveless life represented by Canaanite nations: “But the Lord, your God, did not want to listen to Balaam. So the Lord, your God, transformed the curse into a blessing for you, because the Lord, your God, loves you.” (23:6) And, as we already know, His Love is with us as long as we allow Him in all aspects of consciousness: “For the Lord, your God, goes along in the midst of your camp, to rescue you and to deliver your enemies before you. [Therefore,] your camp shall be holy, so that He should not see anything unseemly among you and would turn away from you.”(23:15), hence selling our awareness of Love to materialistic illusions is how we separate from Him.

This portion, with its 74 Commandments, ends reminding us to destroy the memory, the thought, the feeling and the emotion of doubt, uncertainty and hesitation regarding the only true choice of all that is living in Love’s ways and attributes: “[Therefore,] it will be, when the Lord your God grants you respite from all your enemies around [you] in the land which the Lord, your God, gives to you as an inheritance to possess, that you shall obliterate the remembrance of Amalek from beneath the heavens. You shall not forget!” (25:19)

Let’s be aware always that God’s Love is our Creator, and His Love is our Essence and identity for which we have to live every moment. Love is what we are made of, Love is who we are, and Love is what we have to manifest: “For your Master is your Maker, the Lord of Hosts is His name, and your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel, shall be called the God of all the Earth.” (Isaiah 54:5) “‘For the mountains shall depart and the hills totter, but My loving kindness shall not depart from you, neither shall the Covenant of My peace totter,’ says the Lord, who has compassion on you.” (54:10) While our mistaken values and beliefs (mountains y hills), as well as ego’s fantasies, are ephemeral and they abandon us in their illusion, Love and His peace always remain and waiting for us to embrace them.

About Me

Ariel Ben Avraham

Haifa, Southern Galilee, Israel

Ariel Ben Avraham (f. Zapata) was born in Cartagena, Colombia in 1958. After studying Cultural Anthropology in Bogotá moved to Chicago in 1984 where he worked as a television writer, reporter and producer for 18 years. In the 1990’s he produced video documentaries related to art, music, history and culture such as “Latin American Trails: Guatemala” distributed by Facets.org. Most of his life he studied ancient spiritual traditions and mysticism of major religions, understanding the mystic experience as the individual means to connect with Divinity. Since 2004 he studies and writes about Jewish mysticism and spirituality mainly derived from the Chassidic tradition, and the practical philosophy of the teachings of Jewish mystic Sages. The book “God as Love” is the compilation of his last years studying and learning Jewish mysticism, and the messages of the book are part of the content, exercises and processes of a series of seminars, lectures and retreats that he facilitates in Israel.