THE VEHICLE

There are many ways to use the sefirot in daily devotions and meditations, but the chief of these is that they can be used as a vehicle. Let’s try to understand this idea by breaking it down a bit.

First, it is not the overt meaning of the sefirot that needs to be meditated upon; it is their higher meaning. By this is meant the core of meaning that remains when the qualities are entirely abstracted from the physical realm. If we take Tiferet as an example, its overt meaning is beauty and balance. It is too easy for us to think of beauty in terms of the visual — beautiful faces, bodies, flowers, landscapes. In the entirely spiritual world however beauty must have a completely different meaning.

What does Tiferet mean in the absence of the physical? Spiritual beauty consists of light, balance, harmony, goodness, radiance. It consists of the reflective beauty of God, encompassing those aspects that make the heart feel wonder. This is the Tiferet that we seek in our meditations. So the first goal is to examine the sefirot individually to grasp their inner meanings.

Having done that, the essence of the qualities can be used as a vehicle in the following way. To carry oneself up to God there must be three things: a mechanism of transmission, a medium, and a vehicle that moves through it.

The vehicle is a spiritual component of your own attributes that you have developed by interiorizing the essence of the aspects of God, and that interiorization is accomplished by meditation on those very aspects.

Meditation, or prayer, is the mechanism of transmission, and the medium is the energy of the heart, the loving intent with which you pray.

It is therefore through your heart and your prayer and your inner qualities that you are enabled to rise up to the presence of God.

There is another aspect to this that is worth mentioning. While kabbalah operates on the grid of the ten emanations or qualities, there are five qualities of God that should be meditated on at length and individually. These are: kingship, divine ineffable love, strict justice, creative power, and limitless expansion. These will help to arouse the echo in yourself of those same qualities.

It is wise to be very careful with these, in particular when thinking about ‘strict justice’. No superficial explanation will suffice; this has nothing to do with ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’. It has everything to do with cosmic justice, the kind of justice that takes everything into account BECAUSE IT IS OMNISCIENT. Because God knows everything about every person, His is the only justice that is strictly just.

Through thinking deeply about this we come to the conclusion that any judgment made by a human is and must be lacking in strict justice because we can never know everything about the people or circumstances involved, and because our earthly store of rewards and punishments is so limited and gross compared to the scope and granularity of God’s options.

This kind of meditation draws us to define our own limits as human beings. Once these limits are understood we can take the next step of asking how they can be transcended. But that transcendence can never take place without having done the groundwork first.

The Zohar is all about groundwork. It says to the student: pray, meditate, study the Torah, obey the precepts, learn from your masters, work with the letters and the sefirot and the gematria, prepare, absorb, immerse. Only THEN will supernal secrets be revealed to you that will allow you to reach higher toward the God we are all seeking.

To be told the supernal secrets before you are prepared is useless. If one were to give a lecture in Greek to a student who spoke no Greek, no matter how great the secrets revealed the student would gain nothing from them. And if you think you are ready, it is proof that you are not.

This kind of internal work cannot, paradoxically, be done while in the spirit realm. The physical world is a testing ground, a proving ground. Without the opportunity to work in time and space, souls cannot achieve a critical leap to a higher state of awareness. A version of the world must exist in order to make a platform for the divine plan to restore all souls to their original nature — free particles of God joined to His movement, yet each enjoying its own particular ecstasy.

VISION AND PROPHECY: an interpretation of Ki Tetze section 18,

“Visions by Vision, Simile and Dream”

Why is Rabbi Shimon telling Moses how his prophecy worked? It is because even those of us who DO see visions or hear messages do not understand the mechanism.

But is the mechanism of any importance whatsoever, and why would it be? Surely it is the vision and the message that carries the importance. And these things must be interpreted by the individual having the experience because they are intimately connected with and influenced by the life history and understanding of that particular person. How can Rabbi Shimon have anything to say about Moses’ visions? And what does this have to say to anyone who is living an ordinary life and does not have access to these higher methods of communication with the divine? In other words, what can we learn from Moses and Rabbi Shimon that helps us with our daily lives and devotions?

We can begin by looking at the fire that does not burn — the burning bush that was not destroyed. Here there is a great power at work, greater than the incomprehensible power of fire itself; on the surface it looks like the power that Moses encountered was that power necessary to sustain the life force of the bush even though it was engulfed in flames. But this surface explanation will not suffice. Moses saw what looked like a burning bush, but it was not.

What Moses actually saw was a vision of the interior workings of the holy spirit on earth – the same spirit that came down upon God’s chosen messengers and allowed them to speak in tongues and to do miracles. This is the power of what the kabbalists called the Shechinah and which is in this particular circumstance the Holy Spirit itself. There was no fire. There was no bush. What there WAS was the mind and spirit of Moses opening to a greater reality far beyond that of the material world. In his urge to know God and to act for him and for all his people TO Him, Moses was able to make a connection with divinity which has seldom been made since. And what he saw was what Rabbi Shimon understood: this was the great mercy that God was showing to his people, that no matter how seared they would be by the harsh world in which they found themselves, they would never be consumed.

Moses says that for him the unity within himself of mercy, justice and beauty corresponds to the Vav in the Holy Name, and he refers to it as the Rod of God. The reference is to the rods with which Moses and Aaron did miracles in the name of God. The rod is, like the scepter, the symbol of power derived from a higher source, and it was through that symbol that Moses was able to draw down the power of God to use in the material world. Most significantly, the rod was given to Moses to use in ways that violated the physical laws of this world and that clearly followed higher laws not normally accessible to humankind. The conclusion to be drawn here is that Moses was saying it was his own ability to unite the right and the left aspects that gave him access to the power of God. From this we may infer that such abilities are open to any of us who can make that same union and connection within himself and between himself and God.

Rabbi Shimon tells Moses that at first the vision appeared to him, but later he turned aside and looked for the vision. This indicates a great progression, as it would for anyone. To be given a vision is a great thing; to be able to have a vision when it is needed is a much greater thing. Rabbi Shimon makes the connection between this ability and the commandment to keep the 248 positive precepts. So at this point we are being told that behavior which conforms to the will of God is also pivotal in the ability to be granted the access to visions.

The voice that came with the vision told Moses that he was standing on holy ground. What was meant by this? It meant not that this particular six square feet of ground was holy for any reason. It meant that the connection formed between God and Moses at that moment partook of the divine, and the earth which acknowledged the connection and upon which Moses was standing during the spiritual event was sanctified by the experience. This explains the sanctity of all sacred places and buildings; we do not enter the temple because it is sanctified; the temple is sanctified because it is there that we form the spiritual connection with God through the Holy Spirit. In this same sense, ANY place where we are when this connection happens is holy ground.

Moses speaks about the mirror that comprises ten sefirot, and makes the link between the word vision and its different manifestations depending on which sefirot is being accessed. If we think about this, we come to realize that it means we can have visions on ten different levels. Keter, Chochmah, Binah, Chesed, Gvurah, Tiferet, Hod, Netzach, Yesod and Malchut. A vision of power. A vision of beauty. A vision of love. A vision of majesty. A vision of the kingdom on earth. Each of these visions, were we to have them, would be divinely generated to direct to the heart a particular form of wisdom. And each of the visions comes in the form of a simile; each object in a vision is symbolic, each event is allegorical. The infinite number of ways that God chooses to communicate His wisdom means that the possibilities for vision are unlimited. If we are unable to have such visions ourselves it is wise to look at the visions reported by others to see what we can glean from them. If we DO have such visions ourselves it is wise to report them to the world so that others can glean from them.

However, if we are thinking that visions are impossible for us, we must know that is absolutely untrue. Each person dreams, and the dreams are the visions received with the eyes shut. Paying attention to our own dreams gives us access to visionary experiences of our own.

Rabbi Shimon says that it is because of Moses’ connection with the Torah that God and the Holy Spirit were revealed to him. He is of course suggesting that study of the scriptures and adherence to the commandments will lead us to the vision of God we all desire. He likens the Torah to light, and brings the discussion back again to the five times that light was mentioned in the story of creation and the five rays that shone on the face of Moses during his lifetime. We tend to think of light as something separate from wisdom, though we do use the term ‘to see the light’ when we mean ‘to understand’. But the reading of this whole passage should make us wonder whether wisdom is not indeed actual light, and that if we could see that light with the eyes of the heart we would become as Moses: standing on sacred ground with the light of God before us and within us.