The second portion of Exodus, Ve’era/Appeared,
is read from the Torah scroll on Shabbat, January 9, 2016. See how my wife Miriam and I link this Torah
portion to our life together through photographs and Torah Tweet texts at http://bibleblogyourlife.blogspot.co.il/2014/01/exodus-2-inner-beauty-revealed.html.
The conceptual background for the blog link above is
developed in my book PHOTOGRAPH GOD: CREATING A SPIRITUAL BLOG OF YOUR LIFE
http://photographgod.com. The
four sections below – Inner beauty revealed, Shatter popular images of God, See
KUZU as YHVH in motion, and Make an invisible God visible in a digital age –
are derived from my book.
INNER BEAUTY REVEALED
Va'era/Appeared (Exodus 6:2-9:35)
God spoke to Moses and said to him, "I am YHVH. I
appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as El Shaddai, but with My name
YHVH I did not make Myself known to them." (Exodus 6:2, 3)
We celebrated the marriage of Shmuel and Shevi this week
at Kibbutz Hafetz Hayim. Shmuel's father
Steve and Mel are first cousins.
Steve is a professor of earth sciences at Bar-Ilan
University. He earned his Ph.D. at MIT
and worked for Harvard and the US Air Force.
Our photos show Steve bringing the groom to his bride and
the bride's parents escorting her to the hupa wedding canopy.
Under the hupa, Shevi walks around Shmuel and
Steve blesses them. The band greets the
newlyweds and the dancing begins.
"It is not good for man to be alone. I will make a compatible helper for
him." (Genesis 2:18)
The beautiful dialogue between husband and wife that
draws divine light into every aspect of their lives together is revealed in YHVH.
All the divine names in the Torah are not really names of
God, but rather names for levels of divine light drawn down into everyday life.
The name YHVH revealed to Moses, usually
translated as “God,” should be translated as “Is-Was-Will Be.”
It integrates past, present, and future of the verb
"to be" while revealing the divine attribute of inner beauty (tiferet).
Tiferet is where masculine and feminine divine
attributes meet to create the beautiful inner glow shared by a loving couple.
Tiferet is the beautiful integration of
successfully (netzah) creating a lifelong relationship based upon loving
kindness (hesed).
YHVH as the integrating tiferet was
revealed to Moses, while Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob only knew God as El (hesed)
and Shaddai (netzah).
SHATTER POPULAR IMAGES OF GOD
The most frequently used word in the Bible that is
translated as “God” is YHVH.
Since it is made up of only vowels, it cannot be pronounced. It is the sound of your breathing. YHVH should be translated as
“Is-Was-Will Be.” It combines in four
letters the present, past and future tenses of the verb “to be.” When the Bible is studied in Hebrew, YHVH
is read as Hashem (the unnamed name). When the Bible is read aloud in
synagogue, the reader sees the word YHVH and reads it as another word,
the word for Lord Adonai.
The divine response to Moses asking for God’s name is Ehyeh
Asher Ehyeh, “I Will Be as I Will Be.”
God’s name is no thing, not a noun.
It is a verb that actively points to a future open to all
possibilities.
Getting rid of the popular image of God is the essence of
biblical consciousness. In the Bible,
Abraham is called the first Hebrew, which means “one who crosses over.” He crossed over from popular images of God of
his times shaped from clay to an imageless God that permeates all of reality
and beyond. As a prelude to the
biblical story of Abraham beginning his journey away from his father’s world of
idolatry, the oral tradition tells that Abraham was minding his father’s idol
shop when he took a stick and shattered the merchandise to bits. He left only
the largest idol untouched, placing the stick in its hand. When his father
returned, his shock at seeing the scene of devastation grew into fury as he
demanded an explanation from his son. Abraham explained how the largest idol
had broken all the other idols.
The English word “God” is a Germanic word that often conjures
up images of some all-powerful being in the sky zapping us if we step out of
line. Judaism asks us to shatter
popular images of God.
The Bible admonishes us not to create graven images that
delimit a God that kabbalah calls Ein Sof “Endless” and Ha’efes
Hamukhlat “Absolute Nothingness.”
God is no thing, nothing, and has no name. Different names translated as “God” are
different aspects of divine light permeating our everyday world.
Abandon conceptual graven images, idols of God engraved
in your mind from childhood. Free your
mind from any images of God.
SEE KUZU IS YHVH IN MOTION
The biblical passage beginning with “Hear, O Israel, YHVH
is our God, YHVH is One” (Deuteronomy 6:4-9), is written by a
scribe on small parchment scrolls affixed to doorposts in Jewish homes. These
mini-Torahs called mezuzot, a word related to the root zaz, which
means to move. Each scroll is rolled up with the biblical text on the inside.
On the outside of the scroll at the place on the reverse side of where YHVH
is written, the scribe writes KUZU to set God in motion. K-U-Z-U is spelled with each of the
four letters that follow Y-H-V-H in the Hebrew alphabet. K follows Y, U
follows H, Z follows V, and U follows H.
It is as if we were to write GOD as HPE, H being the letter following G,
P the letter following O, and E the letter following D. In addition to moving
each of the letters in YHVH forward, KUZU is written upside-down
to invite us to see God in motion from multiple viewpoints.
God becomes even more active in the kabbalist’s prayer
book where TDHD is added to KUZU.
TDHD are the four Hebrew letters preceding YHVH, as if GOD
moves backwards to FNC and forwards to HPE.
YHVH spelled backwards is HVHY, pronounced havayah,
meaning "existence." All that exists,
exists within God and beyond.
MAKE AN INVISIBLE GOD VISIBLE IN A DIGITAL AGE
How can you see a God that you think of as being
invisible? We are fortunate to be living
in the digital age that gives us ways to experience invisible worlds becoming
visible. These experiences give us clues
that help us appreciate the insightful imagination of ancient spiritual
teachers who visualized invisible realms.
Today, what was once metaphysics has become physics.
Scientists and engineers have given us tools to see
invisible realms far beyond the narrow band of light that ranges from red to
violet. The entire spectrum of visible
light is only a tiny speck on an electromagnetic spectrum that extends from
invisible long wavelengths like radio waves that can span our solar system to
invisible short wavelengths like X-rays, a fraction of the size of an atom.
Consider that in the very room you are reading this blog
thousands of events throughout the world are invisibly happening
simultaneously: a baseball game in Los Angeles, a chess match in Moscow, sumi
painting lessons in Tokyo, cooking lessons in Jerusalem, carnival time in Rio,
a ping pong tournament in Beijing, and a bicycle race in the south of France.
You may ask, “What are you talking about?
My room is quiet and empty. The
only event occurring in my room is my act of reading this blog.”
Think, however, that when you turn on your smartphone,
computer, tablet or television you
can see all these events that have been silently present in your room all the
time. These events had been transformed
into patterns of electromagnetic energy that cannot be perceived by your
ordinary senses. Invisible, they
permeate your environment even passing unnoticed through your body. In today's digital world, you can tune into
these invisible realms revealing them in full color.
You carry a gateway to the world through the smartphone
in your pocket. These super-phone
mini-computers link you to invisible realms blanketing our planet that you can
make visible with a flick of your finger.
They also provide cameras for you to document what you see by storing
them as invisible bits and bytes.
Unlike photographic negatives of an earlier age where images were
visible, digital technologies store images as invisible binary sequences of
0-1, off-on. In the networked world of
Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Instagram, WhatsApp and Blogspot you can share these
invisible images with friends worldwide who possess the magical ability to
transform them into visual images.
Living in contemporary digital culture provides unprecedented
opportunities, unavailable to all previous generations, to conceptualize how we
can experience an invisible God.
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