Do You See All These Things?

Matthew 24:1-2

Yehoshua/Jesus left the Temple and was walking away when his talmudim/disciples came up to him to call his attention to its buildings.  ”Do you see all these things?” he asked…

Yehoshua left the Temple and was walking away.  He did not offer the prophecies that follow concerning the Temple and the end of the world, its judgement and salvation, to those who were worshipping within the Temple on that occasion — those who did not expect judgement to come first on the House of the Lord/Hashem.

His talmudim/disciples were also unprepared for this and were not expecting it, yet their preparation was in following Yehoshua.  He gave his prophecies to his talmudim/disciples only when he was questioned by them.  He was walking away from the Temple because he was about to leave Jerusalem desolate (Zephaniah 3) and return to his Father who had sent him.

Had Yehoshua failed because he was not received by his own, and therefore the Temple would have to be destroyed?  No!  It was unto this end that he was sent into the world.  The Temple would be destroyed because it was made to be one in the word of prophecy with his body.  As his body would be raised again, so the Temple would be raised again.

Out of Yehoshua’s death would be salvation for Israel.  Out of his rejection would be the reconciling of the world.  All of Matthew 24 should be read in this light.

Since the Temple was built to be destroyed, why was it built at all?  Heaven and Earth were created in order that God might dwell with/ את /Et his dear creatures.  This is the pattern of purpose for the Dwelling Place of God that is revealed through the Temple.

God did not make the world in vain but to be inhabited, Isaiah 45:18.  God created the corruptible world to be a seed that He could re-create into an incorruptible world.  Even if death entered through sin, as indeed it did, God would re-create the world through redemption, which indeed He did and is continuing to do by unfolding and revealing that redemption.  This is the pattern of judgement and salvation revealed by the history and the future of the Temple.

Matthew 24:2 specifically

“Do you see all of these things..?”  Our experience of the Time World / Temple is an aspect itself of that very Time World / Temple.  Yehoshua’s teaching and prophecy framed that experience for his talmudim/disciples and for us.  We must experience death and resurrection with minds and hearts and souls and strength that is, altogether as one Adam, learning.  Don’t allow this to be too deep for you.  Understand it.  Our experiencing redemption as conscious souls, learning repentance, through history, through prophecy, through being subject to judgement, through justice, through mercy, all this is essential to re-creation, the re-creation of the Time World, the Temple above and below, the regeneration of the seed of the universe.

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.

Knowledge – Thought, Consciousness, Soul

Knowledge ˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙ ˙˙˙Mellow Wolf Publishing   PROVERBS CHAPTER 2 From Rabbi Avraham Greenbaum: Azamra Institute, Jerusalem The moralistic philosophy of Proverbs is rooted in a worldview that sees man as a free agent living in a dangerously deceptive world from which God has purposely obscured the truth in order to make it necessary for man to strive to attain it through toil and effort, thereby earning his reward. Caught in a confusing maze in which the most likely-looking paths turn out to be blind alleys and worse, man desperately needs true guidance, which is precisely what Proverbs offers. Proverbs 2 1 My son, if you receive my words and treasure up my commandments with you, 2 making your ear attentive to wisdom and inclining your heart to understanding; 3 yes, if you call out for insight and raise your voice for understanding, 4 if you seek it like silver and search for it as for hidden treasures, In verses 1-4 the voice of wisdom calls to the young, inexperienced “son”, appealing to him to heed the message. He must dedicate all his faculties to the pursuit of the right and left columns of the kabbalistic tree – HOCHMAH-wisdom (v 2) and BINAH-understanding (vv 2-3) – in order to attain the center-column attribute of DA’ATH ELOKIM, the “knowledge” of God (v 5). This is more than merely cognitive knowledge: DA’ATH has the connotation of deep attachment. It is necessary to seek out and cultivate these attributes with the same eagerness that people seek out wealth and treasure. End quote from Rabbi Greenbaum Comments: We have a need to change the paradigm of our very thought about the interests of the heart. Our questions about the human will, its power and freedom, have themselves been framed on the basis of a notion of the human being as an entity that is one with itself alone, on its own mentally and emotionally – alone to think this or that, alone to be interested in this or that…, on its own, defined as being in its nature a complete entity unto itself. We have done this, accepting this philosophical presupposition of thought, even though we know that the human being is a social entity, which if left entirely unto itself from birth, even if physically sustained, would not develop into the human being we are discussing at all. It would not develop the mind we speak of, nor stable emotions, nor even life… How is it then, that the Bible speaks of Adam as having at first been an individual alone? He was not alone “by nature”, neither in heart, mind or soul. He was with God. And even so, this was not enough in God’s estimation. Adam needed to be a fully social being in order to even be a completed creation. And God made a very strong point of this, lest there be any mistake. What do we mean if we say that true knowledge is attained as a reward – through seeking for wisdom on the one side and understanding on the other? First, it is a reward like that of the little child who is rewarded with learning when effort is applied under proper supervision and guidance. Indeed, the reward that comes is not one that the child can be proud of in any sense of self-sufficeincy – not even for the child’s own part, as if it were a part that had the merit to stand on its own, as in an adult partnership. For a child who is truly learning is at the same time learning how to learn. That is to say, even after Adam was a complete creation, male and female, they were no less with God because of it, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. They were children learning how to learn through the guidance of their Father Above. They were not like our idea of an independent adult that knows how to teach themselves what they need to learn and how to learn it. Their real nature was and is the real human nature; it is the nature of a learning child with its parent. It is the nature of a child of God. This is not the condition of a human being, it is the true nature of a human being, and it always will be. True knowledge comes as a reward, but it is the reward of receiving the gift of a shared mind with the Teacher who loves you as a child, has directed you and has supported you to learn in the way you were uniquely designed to learn. The reward of knowledge achieved and acquired all by one’s self in complete isolation would be a pretty sad reward indeed. The reward of a knowledge that is actually achieved through the grace of the Teacher who then says to the student, Well done, my child! is a glorious reward indeed! Thought, Consciousness, Soul   There are two places from which to start the mind, the place that is with the Torah of God and the place that is without the Torah of God. Why is this so? The mind begins to think with God or the mind begins to think without God. In order to better understand this and what it means we have an analogy of experience in our inter-human or inter-animal encounters. We encounter another creature like ourselves and we begin to think. We will either begin to think with the other or separately without the other, as if the other were an object incapable of thought. Even though we know they are certainly thinking about us, we treat them as though they had no mind or soul by thinking about them behind an invisible wall that we project between ourselves and them. It is in this same way that we face God. Sometimes when facing another, especially if we find the other to be “very other”, we delude ourselves into actually relating to them, at least temporarily, as if they were simply an object. By doing so we make sure that we do not begin our thinking with them, that we do not share any consciousness. Sometimes also, as highly vulnerable people, we find the reality that we are at all times facing God too overwhelming. God is just “too other”. At least temporarily, we delude ourselves into relating to God as if God were not God, as if there were only a physical universe out there. By doing this we make sure that we will not form our thought from its beginning by thinking with God. The Torah is the expressed will of God. It is the mind of God expressed in the way that He wants human beings to know it. Why did God share his mind in the form of the Torah only with Israel? There could be two answers given to this. First it could be said that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and then Moses and the whole nation of Israel at Mount Sinai, were the only people to fully open up their minds in encountering God in order to begin their thought with God and with God’s thought – instead of meeting God with a wall, like the untrusted stranger. Yet, if this is the case, we must further ask the question, How did Israel come to be open to God in this way when no other people were? Asking the question how Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and then all Israel, became open to learning to begin all thought with God’s thought brings us to the ultimate answer as to why God shared his mind in the form of the Torah only with Israel. If we ask why it is that we are so afraid of strangers that we do not always greet them in love, with completely open minds and hearts, with no walls, with no assumptions, indeed, with no thoughts except those which are developed mutually, we could answer this by saying that it is because we live in an imperfect and dangerous world. And why is the world this way? We might like to blame others. We might even consider blaming God for making it this way, or at least so that it was possible for it to end up this way. However, it is always better to take responsibility than to judge and blame others. And we know that we have done many things ourselves over the course of time to make the world a less perfect and more dangerous place to live. We come again to the idea that it may be that when we face God we do not face God openly because we have a bad conscience. In the evening God walked in the garden. Instead of coming in joy to meet him, the man and the woman hid themselves because they were ashamed. It is said of Abraham that his tent was open on all four sides so that if any stranger should be passing by on any side he would see them and could run out to greet them and invite them into his home with joyous hospitality. From Abraham many people have learned to strive for this ideal of hospitality. But who did Abraham learn it from? A careful reading of God’s Torah will show that Abraham learned it from God himself. Indeed, Abraham was not always of a trusting mind. He like others was vulnerable in this world, subject at times to the fear of death. Abraham sometimes thought with a logic that began with the inevitability of death, just as, at times, we all do. It was not that Abraham became capable on his own of meeting God with an open heart and mind. Abraham became capable of this because God first came to him in a special way, in a gentle and powerful way of blessing and the promise of blessing. God first went out of his tent to find Abraham as a passing stranger and to overcome his fear and doubts and bring him into his tent. It was from this experience that Abraham learned his own hospitality toward strangers. God saw Abraham, out of his open tent, passing by in a world cursed with suffering and death and he went out to Abraham and spoke to him only of blessings. With the music of blessings, God sang to Abraham of life from the dead, for his family and for all families of the earth. Abraham was turned by the music of God and went with God. Although he did not go to enter into God’s tent and God’s hospitality by walking only in a straight line. He stumbled this way and that, but God gently corrected him and was faithful to guide him. And so it was with Isaac. And so it was with Jacob. And so it was with all the children of Israel. They did not walk only in a straight line, but God was faithful to his promise of blessing to Abraham. He was faithful to extend his blessing and his promise of blessing to Abraham’s family and to all who entered their tent of hospitality. God was faithful to bring them unto himself and to the hospitality of his own mind. For the hospitality of God is the sharing of his mind, his Torah, with a lost and wandering Humanity that has become a stranger unto him. Here, then, we have the answer to our question how it was that Israel came to meet God and learn to start its thought, its very mind, with the Torah, the revealed mind of God, when no other nation or people did this. It was due to God’s own choice of how to approach Humanity. This is the gentle, kind and gracious approach of God. This is the way of God, to meet the lost, the wandering one, the criminal who has no escape from the sentence of death with a blessing. He has not come to Humanity to excuse Humanity’s crimes, but with an invitation into his tent to dine with him, to eat and drink the food that has the power of life, that can raise the dead. This is the promise of God to us where he finds us. If we believe this promise and turn from our own way and go with him we will find him strong and faithful to help us, as he helped Abraham, from turning aside again through our fear of death. For it is in receiving the gift of the mind of God, which he gave to Israel, that we can overcome the fear of death. The Torah of God is the promise of the resurrection of the dead. Our minds either begin with it or without it. The highest hight of consciousness that we experience is really that consciousness that we experience in love, ethical love. Ultimately, we will find that the life of our soul is in love. When the day comes when our consciousness is only in love we will then truly know ourselves. We will understand that our eternal souls are not self-made but are given to us, each by the other, as we think together and know together thoughts of gratitude and praise for the holy God of Israel, who gives all to all.

Getting To The Quick

Nicholas Roerich – Procopius the Righteous Praying Wikipedia

There is a way that life works and there is a way that life does not work.  And there is a way in which every person is sensitive to the way that life works and the way it does not work.  There is also a way in each person that this sensitivity to the way that life works is broken.  We might say that the way that life works is through righteous nurturing, or a righteous practice of love.  The way in which people are most often broken in their sensitivity to knowing the way that life works is in their not recognizing righteousness.  Virtually all people recognize the need of life for nurturing and the need for love.  Many, perhaps most even recognize that love is something that needs to be practiced, not just felt.  However many people, perhaps most people, will disagree with one another at some point about the right way to practice love.  People even disagree about the right way to nurture life.  The reason for all this disagreement is that people are, in one way or another, all broken within their hearts in a manner which makes them unable to perfectly recognize righteousness on their own.  It is possible for people to perfectly recognize righteousness but to do so they need divine assistance.  It was not always so.  Human beings were created able to perfectly recognize and know righteousness, what a righteous practice of love is and what the righteous nurturing of life is.  In the beginning human beings knew what life needed in order to work.

Now they do not.  Not always.  It is for this reason that the God of Israel gave his son to save the world and began this salvation by sending his Spirit into the world to show the world what the way of sin really is, that is to say, what the way that life does not work really is, so that they might also become able to learn what righteousness really is, and, finally, that God has appointed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness by the man who he has raised from the dead.  It is in this way that people are brought into the righteousness and the life of the one whom God raised from the dead.  The Spirit of God brings the word of God to the place in the heart that is broken by sin, that has become insensitive to righteousness, and heals it.  That place of brokenness is a place of great fear and insecurity, a place that is usually guarded and protected well and few things ever get through to it.  However, when the needs of love and life call for the attention of the heart at the place where it is broken by sin, whether the sin of the first human beings or by one’s own sins or that of others, the heart is unable to respond in the right way.  Thus the individual and the life around the individual becomes more damaged.  However, when the Spirit of God brings the word of God, the word of the Good News of Israel and Her Messiah, into the human heart this process begins to be reversed.  As this process can be seen with the individual, so it will be with corporate Humanity.  There is a heart of corporate Humanity, a spirit of life in the one blood of all.  This spirit of human life God has preserved according to his will and has nurtured and cultivated himself, personally, through the covenant of his word, for the time of ultimate healing.  For that time, God has kept this corporate heart of Humanity beating in Jerusalem.  As we see the individual regenerated and brought into the life of the resurrected suffering Messiah of Israel, so shall it be with Jerusalem, with the corporate heart of Humanity.  For as the waters cover the beds of the oceans, so shall the knowledge of the God of Israel cover the earth.

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.

Genesis One – The Imperatives

Glory of Creation by The Wandering Angel via Flickr

• For Creation, existence is an act of obedience.  And obedience is a process of learning, an act of learning.  Therefore existing is a process or an act of learning.  We are literally learning to exist.

It is necessary that there should be an aspect of apparent history with the creation of something out of nothing. For creation must have characteristics and characteristics must be organically related thus constituting character. In the creature, character must develop. It requires an element of time and experience. Therefore, even those characteristics which appeared in the creation of heaven and earth needed, as it were, a history, but they could have no history for they were created out of nothing. Thus, being created out of nothing, they were created with an apparent history.

Genesis One – The Imperatives > Read More

Is The Torah Written On Our Hearts? part one

View from Mount Sinai   Wikipedia

Christianity, as a gentile institution, has a long and somewhat convoluted relationship with the Torah.  Torah has, in English, traditionally been translated and interpreted as the Law of God.  While this translation allows English speaking non-Jews to think about the covenant and commandments given to Israel at Mount Sinai in their own English terms of reference and not to have to study and learn what the Torah meant and means to the Jewish people, it can, at the same time, be misleading even in terms of the English language.  The word, “law” and the concept behind it has a wide variety of connotations and associations to different people in different English speaking nations.  The same can be said about the corresponding terms in other western languages, and indeed in all gentile languages.  One connotation of the word, “law” and the concept of law that is universal amongst all nations, apart from Israel, is that the law is made by  the political forces that form the government of the given nation.  Law and laws are human creations.  This point alone is enough to start us off with a good understanding of why gentile language translations of the Torah of God can evoke misleading ideas.  The word, “law” if used to translate the Hebrew word, “torah,” can leave a person to imagine that the Torah, or Law, of God is something that God created and added to His creation after He had created it – the way human legislators might add laws to a nation after it is already a nation.

If a person were inclined to think that the Torah was merely added to Creation after Creation already existed, Proverbs chapter 8 could be presented in order to correct this idea.  However, the pertinent passage in Proverbs 8 is necessarily written in poetic language and might not have the intended impact unless it were clearly stated that the passage teaches that Creation is made, from beginning to end, according to the precepts of the Torah.  For the Torah is not a dictionary of crimes but a design for life.  This is a challenging teaching of Holy Scripture for Christianity, as a gentile institution, to deal with, and while it has been mostly avoided by Christian teachers, we will have to come back to it again and again.

Whether or not this teaching of Holy Scripture is immediately received or grasped, it can be shown that it is not the English word, “law” that is well suited for bringing a person to this understanding.  Indeed, our sense today is, and rightly so, that laws have to do with crimes and not with sins.  That is to say,  it is not family rules or social or religious customs that constitute crimes but only such actions as deemed by courts to violate specifically written laws.  We do not understand the case to be so much, as Paul said, that by the law is the knowledge of sin, but rather, by the law universally undesired action is made a crime.  Since this is our fundamental concept of law, it is hard for us to think in terms of such a concept being the blueprint of Creation.  If we do try to think this, we have gone way of base.  In fact, it would be better for us to translate the word “Torah” in the context of Proverbs 8, if we must do so, as “Design“, rather than as “Law“.  Creation was made according to the Torah, the Design, of God.  But that Design is not a design that is purposed primarily to define sin or crime.  It is a design that is purposed primarily to illumine the way of Godly love.