Art by Phillip Ratner Commentary by Ariel Ben Avraham “I appeared (lit. was seen, vaeira) to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as the Almighty G-d, but My Name YHWH I did not become known to them.” (Exodus 6:3). Our Sages teach that each of the Divine Names mentioned in the Torah represents a particular quality with which the Creator relates to His Creation.
Regarding YHWH, they indicate that it is related to loving kindness and compassion; hence we can understand it as Divine Love that sustains, relieves and redeems us from the bondage of ego’s materialistic fantasies and illusions. As we have said often, the essential message of the book God as Love is to conceive (from our human consciousness) the Creator as Love and relate to Him through Love. The message is quite simple. If Creation is a clear manifestation of G-d’s Love, therefore the Essence of Creation is also His Love; and such as we must conceive it 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 Love, and also relate to our Creator through Love as our common Essence.
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 G-d to you, and you will know that I am the Lord your G-d, who has brought you out from under the burdens of Egypt.” (6:7). It is G-d’s Love that summons us as our Redeemer, simply because He is our Creator and the only One that 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; and 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 desires (“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 is, as Love manifested in His Creation, and He shows the way to walk before Him as the true sovereign of all dimensions of consciousness, ego included. It is important 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; and the whole process of the Exodus from Egypt is about teaching Pharaoh who is the real G-d in our life. When we realize G-d’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 G-d’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 Love is clearly indicated. Our awareness of Divine Love (represented by Moses, our teacher) is indeed the natural ruler over ego, and it is our constant connection with G-d’s Love (represented by Aaron, the High Priest) the one who 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 G-d’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 First Born, Levi the Priesthood, and Judah the Kingship. Joseph encompasses Israel’s Divine inheritance and legacy which are G-d’s Love in humankind manifested through Israel; Levi represents the spiritual connection with G-d’s Love, as the highest awareness of Him in our consciousness; and Judah represents the material manifestation of G-d’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 G-d’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.
Ariel: Ariel Ben Avraham
Safed, Northern Galilee, Israel
Born in Cartagena, Colombia in 1958. After studying Cultural Anthropology in Bogota, moved to Chicago in 1984, where I worked as a writer, reporter and producer for WSNS/Telemundo for 18 years. Produced video documentaries related to art, music, history and culture, such as “Latin American Trails: Guatemala”, distributed by Facets.org. For more than thirty years studied spiritual traditions from all over the world, and the mysticism of major religions, understanding the mystic experience as the personal means to connect with Divinity. Since 2004 study and write about Jewish mysticism and spirituality, mainly derived from the Chassidic tradition, and the practical philosophy of the teachings of Jewish mystic Sages from the last 2000 years. The book “God as Love” is the compilation of my last three 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 I facilitate in several locations in Israel.
