This parashah/Torah Portion of Bereishit/Genesis, especially the first aliyah, contains almost all of the mind-blowing kabbalistic concepts of the Light of Infinite in it. When Hashem said, Let There Be Light…. And It Was Good, it clues us into the purpose of Creation– to reveal light and goodness in this world.
King David says in Tehillim/Psalms, “The world was built with chesed (loving-kindness).” Our sages teach that “The light that was created on the first day shone from one end of Creation to the other.” In Kabbalah we learn that this was the light of chesed— “an infinite, uncompounded light that filled all of Creation.” The light of Chesed is at the heart of everything. Chesed and giving are at the root of creation and at the root of joy. Spreading light is done by giving joyfully, just as when light from your own flame is shared with another flame, your flame doesn’t become smaller, only the other person’s flame is now ignited.
I can’t help but hear @JohnMayer singing, “just keep me where the light is,” a reminder that we all share this desire to give and receive love and light. The secret to life is rooted in giving– giving to yourself what you may need– love of yourself, belief in yourself– and giving to others, which creates love and community, something every person needs to feel alive. The root of the Hebrew word for love, (the very thing that emanates from the heart) is אהבה/‘ahava’, is the word ‘hav’, which means ‘to give’. Real love is something you only receive through giving love. As Snoop Lion sings on the opening of his album, Reincarnated, “the only way to get love is to give love.”
We see this through the Hebrew language and its numerical value. Blessings come from love and Ahava (the Hebrew word for ‘love’)
Ahava has the same gematria (numerical value), 13, as the word Echad (‘one’). As many of us know, 26 is the numerical value of Hashem’s four-letter name (the Tetragrammaton), the ultimate Divine Infinite Light. So, if we share our love and our oneness— 13 + 13— then we manifest that Divine Light.
If we look at the world or even oneself like a sun and the light of the sun as Hashem, then we can see that even if the sun’s rays are found within the body of the sun, or ourselves, the rays can’t be said to “exist” there, as they are in a “nonexistent” state as they are one and do not have a separate identity. The same way that the sun rays within the sun-globe are nullified, since nothing but the sun itself can exist within itself, we see this Hashem, the tzimtzum (the constriction of light) has limited our view of Hashem’s light in this world, but that is through the hiddenness of physicality and materialism. In a true sense, there is only Hashem. We are all light, we all have Hashem within us. We generally can’t see it within ourselves or even in the world, as it is all light, so in that sense it seems to not even exist, but if we bestow our light unto another, then we can see the beams of light from within us, around us, and mirrored back to us. That is when we see light, that is when light is revealed. As we see from the first verses in this Parashah, light is good, and good is only good when given. So to reveal light, we have to share light and that is how we manifest good and light in this world, that is how we are able to take it from a seemingly “nonexistent” state to something revealed.
There’s a song on an album I used to listen to called Life of Pablo, and the chorus is very moving, it goes:
We on an ultralight beam
We on an ultralight beam
This is a God dream
This is a God dream
This is everything
Everything
We certainly can’t see the ultralight beam or the God dream in its revealed state, but if we have emunah (faith) and bitachon (trust) in both of those as truth, this, that thought is everything, and the Torah is where we can reveal the secrets (neelam) in this world (olam).
You can read part of this Dvar/article in the Jewish Journal &
READ IT IN FULL @ www.lightofinfinite.com
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Thanks for listening/reading.
Much love, Erez Safar
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