As Big Sean raps on Justin Bieber’s album, “Believe”, “the grass ain’t always greener on the other side. It’s green where you water it.”
It’s like this with anything— our relationship with our partner, with life, & just the same or even more so with our Source, the Light of Infinite. We need to open our eyes & align with the present & have that presence manifest concretely. The verses below contain so much wisdom on how to open our eyes, through tzitzit, and how to elevate oneself to Divine consciousness.
“Speak to the Israelites & have them make tassels on the corners of their garments for all generations….”
We’re commanded to perform the ritual of tzitzit: to see them, and, in seeing, to remember Hashem’s commandments and, in seeing & remembering, to keep them. It’s their being “in sight” that reminds us & brings us to action.
Judaism is a religion that’s built on action. Love without loving actions grows stale & often leads to a distancing from what once felt unbreakable. Our faith is tied with action because action is giving of oneself, & it is through the mitzvot & other Jewish rituals that attachment, clarity, unification & love manifest themselves.
We have 613 mitzvot. The word tzitzit has the numerical value of 600, & the tzitzit themselves have eight strings & five knots, totalling 613. So, the mitzvot that we are commanded to remember & to follow are contained in the tzitzit. As it’s written, “And you shall see it & remember all the commandments of God.”
All of the Torah’s commandments are meant to take physicality & elevate it to spiritualize “reality”. It’s only when we act with the intent to unify ourselves with Divine consciousness that we can unify the animal & Godly souls within ourselves. The tzitzit are said to gather the exiles toward redemption, which is why we gather their four corners into one hand prior to reciting the Shema, which of course includes this very paragraph on tzitzit from our Parsha. Mitzrayim (Egypt) reflects Meitzar (constriction), which is the definition of exile– spiritual narrowness & constriction.
Thanks for listening/reading!
Much love & Shabbat Shalom!
– Erez // @erezsafar
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I DO A DEEP DIVE INTO HOW TO TURN THOUGHT, SPEECH, & ACTION INTO ELEVATION @ https://lightofinfinite.com/out-of-sight-out-of-mind/
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