Why Do We Frame Things?

Why do we frame things?  Often because we want to remember them.  We frame special moments in our minds.  Often, we frame our thoughts.  We frame special moments in our experience. Sometimes we quickly take our camera and seek and frame a special moment, event or action in the viewfinder and snap a picture of it.  We also frame what we need to learn when we want to learn something.

When we frame something we are beginning a process of focusing on something.  We are drawing a line, a frame, around what we will take into consideration, and we are framing out what we will not take into consideration.  This enables us to identify and clarify a subject.  If we want to focus narrowly on a subject we will frame the subject accordingly, framing in what we think is a meaningful background to the subject and framing out what we do not think will help us focus on the subject in the way that we want to.  If we want to focus on a wider subject we will frame our subject in a different way.  If we want to frame a bigger picture, we will frame in a whole field of view and will not focus in on something in a way that creates a sharp distinction between foreground and background.

If we frame what we need to learn for our own personal needs we might find that we are framing them widely but then when wanting to express what we have learned to others find that we are framing the same things narrowly.  On the other hand, we might have our thoughts about what we have learned framed very narrowly but find other people are wanting us to frame the same thoughts much more widely when we try to talk to them about them.  These are examples of how we are regularly involved in framing things.

Notes on The Soul #1

Psalms 1:1-2   Wikipedia

Every soul of Adam was created in the creation of Adam. Every soul is a branch of the corporate aspect of the soul of Adam.

No adamic soul derives its identity from anywhere other than from Adam and from the creation of Adam. Adam derives his/her identity from the source of his/her creation, which is Mashiach.

The creation of Adam’s soul among the souls of earth is unique in its process. In order to understand the full relationship of Adam’s soul to the souls of the other creatures, one must study the creation of souls, including Adam’s soul, in the context of the whole account of Creation.

When the record of Scripture speaks of every soul being created after its kind, it is speaking of the souls being created with a primary corporate nature. In order to understand this properly, we must understand, not only that, but also something of how right from the beginning Creation came into being as an obedient act.

“By the word of HaShem were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth,” Psalms 33:6. “Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God,” Hebrews 11:3. “…by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water,” 2 Peter 3:5. As the heavens obeyed the commandment of the word of God, so also did the earth, but each in a way of mystery that spoke of the world to come.

Notes on The Soul #2

via Wikipedia

Why are there five days of creation before the creation of Adam’s soul?  Why are there six days altogether?  Why are there days involved in the act of creation at all?  In order to answer these questions, we must begin to learn something about how all things came into existence through obedience to the commandment of God.

Our limited logic makes us ask how that something which does not yet exist can act to obey anything at all.  We are forced to ask this question because we think in terms of the obedience or lack of obedience of Adam with free-will.  We need to see that there is another kind of obedience, the obedience which is produced by the power of the commandment of God itself.  In other words, on this original level of obedience the word, the commandment, of God does not just create something, it creates the obedience to itself through which there is a process of response which allows for the thing which God desires to come to exist as God desires it.  This power to obey God and to exist, and not just to exist but to exist just as God desires, and to do so in a manner that God can show approval of the act of obedience, all of this is the power that God gives to all things.  It is this power that underlies Adam’s free will.  Without it they would not have the potential or power to obey the word of God at all.

From the outset, the record of Scripture shows that there is a hidden aspect to how the commandment of God enables the heavens and the earth to obey God and to exist and finally to exist just as God desires.  How Scripture shows this is by recording that the commandment of God is only made explicit in the creation of light.  Before that, in the creation of heaven and earth itself, there is no explicit commandment of God.  Nevertheless, we know, as is given in Psalms 33 and other places, that the heavens and earth were called out of nothing to come into existence by the commandment of God.

Because the commandment of the word of God is made explicit only in the creation of light for the first time, it might be thought that the darkness and the heavens and earth of that darkness did not come into existence only through an act of obedience to the word of God in the very same way that light did.  The secret to understanding this is to understand that the text of the record is written in a way that directly reflects the way heaven and earth were created.  First the commandment which brought heaven and earth into existence through its power was made in the form of a declarative statement. “In the beginning God created the aleph/tav-heavens and the aleph/tav-earth.”  Heaven and earth were hear this declarative statement as if it were an imperative commandment for them to exist and to exist in every detail from aleph to tav as God desired.  When heaven and earth did obey and come into existence but in darkness and not in the way that God ultimately desired, God then refined his commandment with an imperative, an explicit commandment that light should come to exist.

We begin in this way to learn how the word of God has the power to cause creation to obey it and come into existence out of nothing, but in order that creation merit the full approval of God in a perfect and complete obedience the word of God is made to graciously help and assist creation in its act of obedience.  When the commandment is first given it is given in the most considerate manner possible, a declarative statement of God.  Only when Creation, through its youth and weakness, fails in its false modesty to fully apprehend the commandment and obey it by producing a splendor of light in praise of its Creator, does God Himself cause His word to take on the role of assistant to the obedience of the Creation.  The first action of the word of God in helping Creation to perfect its obedience is to command explicitly of Creation that it should shine with light.

And so we see already at the beginning two ways in which the word of God empowers Creation’s ability to obey.  First the word of the commandment to exist is given at the ultimate and highest level of God’s respect for His Creation, through a declarative statement, which should be understood and obeyed in full but is only understood and obeyed partially.  Then, the commandment is made clearer for Creation by an explicit, imperative command.  It is as if the word of God begins to take Creation by the hand to show it how to act in a fuller obedience.

From learning to understand these things we will learn to understand why there are days of creation and why there are five days of creation before the creation of Adam’s soul.  We will also learn from this how Adam’s soul is unique and how it is related to the souls of all other creatures.

Sotah 5b – Psalms 51:17

by Getty Images via @daylife

“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and crushed heart, O God, You will not despise.”

The Talmud teaches, here that now that the Temple is destroyed, one who brings a broken heart and spirit before God is regarded as having brought whatever sacrifice is needed in their life. The Christian asks how this Judaism is possible. If one does not look up to the one lifted up on the pole, as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, the Christian asks, how can his or her repentance be complete?

Open the link below to read this document (in progress) from my paper Let Us Go On.

Included subjects:

• Regeneration of both Jewish and Christian believers
• Not two covenants but two givings of the one covenant
• The attitude of regeneration
• What atonement is
• What “I will have mercy and not sacrifice” means
• more

Sotah 5b – Psalms 51:17 the full article ___updated June 24, 2009

Creation, the Messiah, the Torah, the word of G-d?

Shema Yisrael…    Wikipedia

• How often are we told that Creation was made by the word of G-d?  Such a statement is actually a restatement of the first commandment.  G-d’s own personal restatement of the first commandment is the Good News of Israel and her Messiah.  The first commandment and the restatements of the first commandment are commanding attention, which first means silence, of voice and thought.  It meas stillness and readiness for the sake of listening, for the sake of the beginning of learning.
  

“Question:  How do you know there really is a G-d, or that He actually gave the Jewish people the Torah at Mount Sinai?

Answer:   Here is a story being told by millions of people about millions of people.

In science when you want to test the authenticity of something you subject it to variances. The more variances it withstands the more likely it is to be correct.

When I inquired about Jewish history I found a most phenomenal factor. The same exact story has been told by millions of people, throughout thousands of years, in cities on every continent, and by people of various classes and interest.”

via How do you know the Torah is really the word of G-d? – torah torah’s divine origins.

Ultimately, it is G-d Himself who the millions are witnesses to, not just that there is a G-d but who He is.  And ultimately, it is not the millions who are the most important witnesses but the one, the one corporate, organic people and nation.

G-d is One

“One of the primary expressions of Jewish faith, recited twice daily in prayer, is the Shema, which begins “Hear, Israel: The L-rd is our G-d, The L-rd is one.” This simple statement encompasses several different ideas:

1. There is only one G-d. No other being participated in the work of creation.
2. G-d is a unity. He is a single, whole, complete indivisible entity. He cannot be divided into parts or described by attributes. Any attempt to ascribe attributes to G-d is merely man’s imperfect attempt to understand the infinite.
3. G-d is the only being to whom we should offer praise. The Shema can also be translated as “The L-rd is our G-d, The L-rd alone,” meaning that no other is our G-d, and we should not pray to any other.”

via Jewish Virtual Library

To represent G-d as being divisible into parts, or to suggest praying to a human being would contridict the revealed faith of the Torah.  What word do we speak of as being the word of G-d if the G-d whose word it is is not the G-d of the Torah?

Justification for Human Existence ?

Sepher Torah from Theresienstadt Concentration Camp Wikipedia

Give the arrogant the job of sustaining their existence or generating even a moment of their own life.  Tell the sinner who takes their own life and existence for granted and are so ready to claim the right to do things their own way, to pursue their own pleasure and security and to defy anyone to stop them, that in three minutes they will cease to exist unless at that moment they do the work of making themselves to exist.  Their mouth would slack, their eyes would gap, for they know they have no access to such power as they would need to cause themselves to exist for even an instant.   But to do this job would require more than mere power.  It would require the ability to justify one’s existence as good and sustainably good for all the worlds.  Indeed, we know that our existence, our living existence, our living conscious existence, our living conscious free will existence must be good for the creation, not just for a moment but for ever and ever, or else it would have been better had we never been born, never created.  Therefore we have no justification of our existence and with every fiber of our being we can only hope that God does.  For if God does not provide a justification for human life, it is an evil thing that we exist.

This is the truth.  Because we know that it is the truth, perhaps we should consider that it is not so much rank arrogance as a dreadful fear that makes us want to cover over this reality and simply take life for granted, to be brash and crude about life and live by an ideology of materialism.  According to the Torah of God and even according to human laws written through human conscience, there are sins or crimes that are more wicked and less wicked.  Perhaps our true wickedness is not one consisting of a mature and knowing arrogance but of a small and cringing fearfulness of the shame of our own evil inclination.            – Genesis 3

Judaism wrestles with this shame and seeks to overcome the immaturity of the guilty, cringing fear by learning how to obey the Creator’s commandments to Israel – and to do so with a consciousness that even the human inclination to evil must be brought into human service if we will succeed in obeying God with all our heart all our mind and all our soul and strength.  Christianity turns full force to fall upon the Great Tzaddik, the Great Righteous Son of Adam, to justify life for all his brothers and sisters who cannot justify life for themselves.    ∆ references on Genesis 3 /Tanya/Likuety Moharan #— /Revelation 2 and 3 > overcome = overcome cringing fear of death/no-fearful can enter into divine shalom.

The Torah and The Resurrection

Notes to God that fill the cracks… Getty Images via @daylife

What Is The Definition of Corporate Humanity?

There are many ways in which various nations, peoples and cultures define Humanity or the Human Race.  Some start with the individual human being, some with the male-female pair, some with the family or tribal collective.  But there is only one people who truly begin their definition of Humanity, the corporate entity, with God.  And that is Israel, the Jewish People.  This definition is only hinted at in the creation story itself, when we are told that God created the first Adam in his image and in his likeness, making the Adam male and female.  The Jewish definition of corporate Humanity as beginning with God is only really made explicit on Mount Sinai, as stated in the first of the ten commandments, where we read of God speaking to the nation Israel as one entity, saying, “I am the LORD your God, who brought you up out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.  You shall have no other gods before me.”  Here we see that Israel does not and cannot exist as a corporate entity of Humanity without being defined by God in his action and in his spoken definition of that action.  God defines Israel as a corporate human entity in relation to Himself, and Israel’s definition of Humanity then becomes an obedient confession and acknowledgment of this definition.  This is the very well-spring of the Torah.

Unlike definitions of Humanity that are modeled on and built on the individual or the male-female pair, or even on the collective family, tribe, nation or planetary population, the Jewish definition of corporate Humanity is not a fixed and static definition but has all the potential of becoming implicit in a foundational relationship of identity with the Living God.  Thus the Torah definition of corporate Humanity looks both backward to the first creation of Adam and forward to a creation of Adam in full spiritual and physical immortality and incorruptibility, where Humanity through the blessing of being identified with God can live in holy intimacy with God and bless all creatures and all creation in bringing all things together with them into that eternal, incorruptible intimacy with the Living God.  This is the salvation and healing of Israel, the resurrection of the dead, and the new creation of all things.