Parshat Beshalach: Bringing us up to the Creator

“You in Your loving kindness have led the people that You have redeemed, You have guided them in Your strength to Your abode.” (Exodus 15:13)

The Exodus from Egypt is indeed the quintessential demonstration that God’s love rules and sustains His entire creation. The verse above tells us that redemption in any way comes from an act of love. Thus we understand that justice is served out of what is the right thing to do, for doing what is right is the unalienable expression of the goodness emanated from love. We have said often that love is framed and manifest as an ethical principle, for righteousness is inherent to love, as also justice and peace. Love encompasses all with roots in goodness, hence it does not cohabit or compromises with anything different from its ways and attributes.

God’s love also has a purpose in His actions, and in the verse we read that is about guiding His people to His abode. Hence we realize that this amazing entire process of being taken out from one place to another, actually from opposite extremes, implied a complex change in human consciousness for which the children of Israel were chosen.

Let’s be aware that if this process required awesome miracles that broke all possible physical laws, we must contemplate and meditate on the discernment, thought, mental and emotional patterns that also needed to be broken in order to be able to ascend to God’s abode.

Let’s contemplate and meditate on this process we recall every day in the morning and the evening in our daily prayers, for we were divinely chosen to cross over a split sea to be saved and redeemed from the most negative forms and expressions of the lowest material human traits and trends, in order to ascend to the highest realm of spiritual awareness necessary to share the abode of the Creator of all worlds and realities, whose loving kindness sustains them all.

“You brought them in, and planted them in the mountain of Your inheritance, the place O Lord that You have made for Yourself to dwell in; the sanctuary O Lord that Your hands have established. The Lord shall reign for ever and ever.” (15:17-18)

Then we are summoned to reflect on the mount of God’s legacy, a place that surely we have to ascend to. We know it is the Temple of Jerusalem as the connecting and bonding time and space between Israel and God. If He established this house and formed it with His hands, as the verse says, to bring us there with Him back then, we must think about why we are not dwelling there together as we did after He took us out of Egypt with a strong hand and stretched arm. By choosing us to be with Him, we also must choose back to bond permanently with Him.

A lot of time has past ever since the Exodus from Egypt we remember every day, and now we consider what are the changes and transformations we need to go through in order to cross over from our current perennial attachments, obsessions and addictions to ego’s fantasies and illusions to the highest expressions of love’s ways and attributes as the destined traits and trends to reign in our consciousness, as the eternal paradigm of our final redemption and the Messianic era we all yearn for.

“(…) then you shall know that the Lord has brought you out from the land of Egypt.” (16:6)

If God’s loving kindness was there for us to bring us out from slavery in Egypt, it surely has always been there for us, including this times, when we are yearning for our final redemption. We need to cry out loud by also strengthening our hand as our own awareness of love as our essence and common bond with God, and stretching our arm as our reaching out to remove from us all traces of negative discerning, thinking, feelings, emotions and actions, and also from our surroundings.

Our sages tell us that the Messianic times arrive when we remove the memory of Amalek from the face of the earth, as it is written.

“(…) for I will utterly blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven. (…) the Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation.” (17:14, 16)

God is indeed at constant war against Amalek because He does not cohabit with negative traits and trends, and with this He is commanding us to do the same for our own sake, for our own individual and collective redemption.