Illustration by Yoseph Savan based on The Zohar . by Ariel Ben Avraham We must always be aware that we are an emanation of God’s Love. We are His creatures. We belong to Him. We have an unbreakable connection with our Creator. Judaism proclaims in its fundamentals that He created all that exists, and also sustains and directs His Creation. These principles seem to rebound on a wall in our consciousness called ego. As long as we live believing that we are our own creators and our own gods, we live an illusion. There is no separation from God until we come with the idea or feeling that we are far from Him.
We have said in this blog that being individuals doesn’t make us individualists. We obviously are separate entities as individual humans, but this fact doesn’t entitle us to separate from each other. By separating from each other we mean being indifferent, indolent, cruel or against each other. We are meant to live close to each other since the moment we are born. We need each other and this makes us responsible and accountable to each other. Free will is empowered by righteousness to make positive choices. Without knowledge of what is right and good we will never be able to execute free will. We learn from experience in order to act accordingly, and we are supposed to act for the sake of our individual and collective well being. This implies that what is good to us individually must also be good for each other. This is the purpose of the entire Torah.
If we act against this fundamental principle, we are living against God’s will. This is the seminal message of the Torah, and our Jewish Prophets remind us that the Final Redemption comes when we begin to truly love each other. It means that, in other to do that, we must remove everything that is against God’s will. We are talking about the negative trends and tendencies in our consciousness, derived from ego’s fantasies and illusions. The Messianic Era is about living in Love’s ways and attributes, and our Prophets tell us that it is only up to us. Once we realize that we are an extension of God’s Love, we become accountable to His ways and attributes.
We owe our life to goodness, hence we have to respond to it by being and doing goodness. This is our Essence and true identity, from which we were created, for God is good. The Prophet tells us that God asks us to be accountable for the Love He bestows on us.
“The Lord has stood up to plead, and He is standing to judge the peoples. The Lord will enter into judgment with the elders of His people, and the princes thereof: ‘It is ye that have consumed the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in your houses’.” (Isaiah 3:13-14)
The Creator pleads for those we afflict and oppress with indifference, indolence, negligence and baseless rejection. We belong to each other as we belong to God. Hence He pleads on behalf of them to remind us to be good as He is with us. This reminder is His judgment for the peoples. In a deeper meaning these are the lower aspects of consciousness we neglect. Emotions and feelings that make us feel lack, abandoned, rejected or humiliated. These are the poor of the land, the weak aspects of consciousness that we must protect, nurture, straighten and empower in order to be strong parts of our consciousness.
Our higher levels in consciousness, the elders and the princes, are accountable to the lower ones which are the poor, the orphans and the widows. We must love ourselves enough to take us from depression, frustration, discouragement, dejection, anger, greed or envy, and transform our negative feelings and emotions into positive and enhancing qualities. We owe to ourselves our complete well being by returning to Love as our true identity. We can only achieve this by loving and helping each other.
We mustn’t allow our good judgment and positive qualities fall to ego’s fantasies and illusions that consume the goodness of life. This is the vineyard they consume, and the spoils they devour from our emotions and feelings as the poor we dispossess from the goodness of life. The houses where we store the spoils are our egos.
“What do you mean that you crush My people, and grind the face of the poor?’ says the Lord of hosts. Because that daughters of Zion have been haughty, and they walk stretching out the neck, and deceiving with the eyes, walking and mincing they go, and making a tinkling with their feet.” (3:15-16)
The Creator holds us responsible for the well being of our individual and collective lives. Ego’s fantasies and illusions are the daughters of what we have turned into vanity and futility. Zion is the awareness of our permanent connection with God. The Prophet denounces what we have made of our Essence and true identity. He claims that we have prostituted our higher consciousness by letting her go behind ego’s fantasies and illusions, and follow their negative outcomes.
“And the Lord will fray the crown of the head of daughters of Zion, and the Lord exposes their secret parts. In that day the Lord will take away the beauty of their tinkling anklets, and of the embroidered works, and of the crescent-shaped ornaments.” (3:17-18)
Once again God’s Love redeems us from the consequences of our negative choices. He promises to remove the negative traits that undermine the awareness of our permanent connection with Him, represented here by the crown of the head. This removal will make us know the inner beliefs, thoughts, emotions and instincts we kept secret, which also kept us naked from the true garments God chothed us since the moment He created us. Thus we will realize that there was nothing beautiful in the fantasies and illusions for which we traded our Essence and true identity.
“Of the pendants, and the bracelets, and the veils. Of the turbans, and the ornaments of the legs, and of the head bands, and of the perfume boxes, and the amulets, (…)” (3:19-23)
All we have been creating — to reaffirm our alleged separation from the Creator — since we left the Garden of Eden, God’s Love will remove from our consciousness. All we have invented to cover and dress our consciousness instead of the garments of God’s attributes and Commandments will disappear. These garments, fragrances, ornaments and amulets are the ideas, beliefs, ideologies, whims, desires, fantasies and illusions that attract our oppressors and turn them into our punishments.
“And it shall come to pass, that instead fragrance there shall be stench; and instead of a girdle rags; and instead of curled hair baldness; and instead of a rich robe a skirt of sackcloth; branding instead of beauty.” (3:24)
What we create out of ego’s fantasies and illusions sooner or later become our oppressors and punishments. “His own iniquities do capture the wicked, and with the ropes of his sin he is held.” (Proverbs 5:22) Life is the land where goodness must prevail. It is also the field where we wage wars against what denies goodness. Ego’s fantasies and illusions consume the goodness of life. They are the sword by which we fall, including all that makes us strong.
“Your men shall fall by the sword, and you mighty ones in the war. And her gates shall lament and mourn. Yea, she has been emptied, on the ground she shall sit upon.” (Isaiah 3:25-26)
Once we surrender to ego’s fantasies and illusions, the awareness of our permanent connection with God mourns and laments. We surrender to emptiness and fall down bellow, waiting for God’s Love to awaken our Love once again. This is the Final Redemption we yearn for, in which we will be aware the our Love and God’s Love are united forever.
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
