This parashah highlights another aspect of the Torah Way of deveikut/ chey’rut as emunah (faith). Without faith, nothing really happens in the spiritual world. The ancient rabbis narrowed the 613 mitzvot down to essentially one mitzvah and that mitzvah is stated in Habbakuk 2:4: “The just shall live by his faith.” Or, as also mentioned in ’Amos 5:4: “Seek me [God] and you shall live.” This is the essence of the Torah, as articulated in the Talmud (Makot 23b–24a). The entire Torah, then, is summed up in Habbakuk’s statement about faith. The Zohar, too, considers faith extremely important: “The person who walks in the ways of the Torah, walks with faith that nothing harmful of this world can affect him” (Zohar, Vol. 1, 201b). Faith brings about redemption, and that’s what we see in this parashah. The first act of faith was following the Cloud of Glory (Anan HaKavod) during the day and Pillar of Fire (Amud Ha’Esh) during the night. Shemot 13:21 says, “God [the Eternal One] went before them by day ... [and] by night.” In some of the midrashic sources, “the Eternal One” includes as well the Celestial Court (Midrash Shemot Rabbah 19:6; Zohar, Vol. 2, folio 46a). In this context, the Eternal One went before them by day and the Celestial Court (which may have been the archangel Mikha’el) went by night. In the time to come, however (messianic times), only the Tetragrammaton will go before us (Midrash Shemot Rabbah 19:6), and, as it says in Tehillim 139:11–12, “the light be night about me, even the darkness is not dark for thee, but the night shines like the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.” What King David was describing is a stage in the deveikut/chey’rut process, a steady experience in which one experiences the continual influx of the light, whether awake or “asleep.” For the awakened ones, the internal messianic times are here now, as David described. Rabbi Gabriel Cousens, MD Torah as a Guide to Enlightenment (Parsha BeShelach)
Posted on: Sat, 14 Jun 2014 02:00:18 +0000
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