Only Before Our Eyes

Photo by Sergey Katyshkin

When Joel learned I’d be speaking tonight, he said, “Make it relevant.” Immediately I felt dread. Just what I want to talk about! Everything from Covid-19 to wildfires.

Then a post from Rabbi Lisa Goldstein came across my desk. She acknowledged the same long list of woes—and added one more thing to dread: the High Holy Days. She says, 

Now we are coming 
up to the Days of Awe, 
the days the liturgy tell us
are awesome and full of dread—
as if that were a good thing!¹

She asks how dread can lift us up, open spiritual gates, and help us live a more attuned, more aligned life. Well, she certainly had my attention! 

The Hebrew word for dread is yirah. Rabbi Goldstein says,

 Yirah
is an impossible-to-translate word 
that lives in the intersection 
between awe and fear.²

Then she shares a remarkable insight when she says,

Our tradition grounds yirah 
firmly in the realm of love.³  

Really? Immediately I wanted to know more! Rabbi David Greenstein says, 

Jewish tradition affirms 
through our daily prayers
that our Torah is 
the expression of an eternal
and abounding Divine love.⁴

Tonight we’ll explore how it’s possible to speak about fear, dread and Divine love all in the same breath. 

If we could quote musician Sheryl Crow, we’d cut to the chase and declare that,

Love is all there is.⁵

But we often hear it said that God sends suffering. The Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, offers a more enlightened view when he says,

Evil does not descend from above. 
The transmission from above is pure and coherent.

Evil is distortion and noise, an artifact of our reception. 
If we would only adjust our reception devices,—
our attitude and our ability to receive—
the signal would become clear. 

And that is all of life—adjusting reception.⁶

So we could say evil is a right thing seen in a wrong, distorted way. Our opportunity during these Days of Awe is to learn to adjust our reception; to fine tune it so we can think and act as if we were what we really are.

Metaphysics⁷ teaches that,

The one infinite good 
does not contain evil, a broken bone, 
or anything that is wrong—
not one iota of imperfection or inharmony.⁸ 

— Martha Wilcox

The Science of Being demands that we look beyond the deflection, illusion and distortion seen with our eyes, and behold in our conscious awareness the perfect idea of divine intelligence.

To do this requires spiritual vision—so important that in Proverbs it says, 

Where there is no vision, the people perish.⁹ 

Our mission is to see as God sees. This means we must use our divine faculty of spiritual discernment. 

The famous Hassidic Rebbe of Ger used his spiritual vision even at the age of five. A religious man offered him a golden coin if he could tell him where God dwells. Without hesitation, the child replied, “I’ll give you five golden coins if you can tell me where he doesn’t!”¹⁰

Rabbi C. M. Weinberger tells the story of a Holocaust survivor who decided to visit his one-time spiritual master, by then the grown-up Rebbe of Ger. The survivor had been deported to the death camps where he lost his family and his entire community. 

In the camps he also lost his G-d. He just couldn’t believe anymore. Yet he missed his old Rebbe and went to visit him in Tel Aviv. The Rebbe of Ger himself had lost large chunks of his family and nearly all of his some 200,000+ followers.

Upon hearing the story of his disciple, the Rebbe broke into sobs. The man and his Rebbe sat together both mourning what they had lost. After a long period of weeping, the Rebbe wiped his tears and said, in Yiddish,

Before your eyes.   

When the Rebbe said “before your eyes,” he was referring to Moses’ account of how he descended from Sinai and saw that the people had been so quick to turn from the path that G-d had prescribed. Moses said, "I grasped the two tablets, and threw them down from my two hands, and I smashed them before your eyes."¹¹

What Moses was saying, explained the Rebbe, was that, 

I smashed the tablets only before your eyes. 
The shattering of the tablets occurred only before your eyes 
and from your own vantage point. 

In reality, there exists a world in which 
the tablets have never been broken.¹²

This tells us that right where the problem seems to be—whatever it is—the eternal spiritual fact of perfection exists. The mystical  Zohar is the foundational writing for Jewish metaphysics. It describes God as infinity, an eternal field of energy called Ein Sof from which all of creation emanates. In The Essential Kabbalah, Daniel Matt writes, 

There is nothing 
that is not pervaded by 
the power of divinity.¹³

As we would say to a child, 

There is no spot where God is not.¹⁴ 

Pure consciousness is a field of pure intelligence, perfect orderliness, perfect harmony and perfect administration. It is Bliss. It is Divine Love. It is Source. 

The Institute of Metaphysical Science offers food for thought in our discussion tonight that aligns with much of what we know about consciousness. And like the Rebbe of Ger it also explains how our vantage point—our point of view—is what determines the experience “before our eyes.”

The Institute teaches that the world “before our eyes” is a sensory world laden with paradox that gives immediate feedback on the accuracy of our perception. Each paradox, or set of opposites, is a continuum. For example, from poor to rich with many points in between; 

• from sick to well, with many points in between; and

• from fear to awe, with dread as one of many points on the continuum; etc.

Regardless of what is “before our eyes” on the continuum, it is simply a view of unseen perfection. Our only ‘task’ is to let the fact of what is actually—and eternally—present to be lively in our conscious awareness. 

Everything in the world of paradox, whether so-called positive or negative, derives from Absolute spiritual qualities. Qualities such as Abundance, Wholeness, Goodness, Loving Kindness, and so forth. It just doesn’t always look that way. For example, it is said that,

Every sickness 
is the hidden existence
of perfect Health
awaiting conscious discernment.¹⁵ 

— Betty Albee

How can we be so confident? Because there’s only ever one thing going on! It is Reality—the eternal at-one-ment of divine consciousness and its infinite manifestation. It is divinity knowing Itself.  

The Tao says there are only two words we need to remember in all of this. Those two words, ironically, are: 

Not two!¹⁶

Rumi makes this point so beautifully when he writes:

I know nothing of two worlds
All I know is the One.
I seek only One
I know only One
I find only One
And I sing of only One.¹⁷

A condensed Zen sutra is also helpful. It says:

When the mountains and waters 
are not the mountains and waters,
they are the mountains and waters.¹⁸

This may take a while for us to wrap our heads around, but as the Zohar occasionally concludes a possibly baffling section, 

If you get it, you got it.¹⁹

Whenever there’s something we need to know, it’s always best to start with what we do know of God. We must learn, as Elijah did, that God is not in the earthquake, wind or fire, but in the still small voice that reverberates as our conscious awareness. 

We are being called by events in our world, like never before, to be what we really are. Consciousness in motion. Divinity in action. That’s our—and our neighbor’s—true nature.

From the standpoint of human living, you've heard it before:

Outer depends on inner.²⁰ 
The world is as we are.²¹
We are the world we walk through.²²

As visionary and mystic Neville Goddard says, 

One's chief delusion is the conviction that
there are causes other than 
one’s own state of consciousness.²³

In a lecture by Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, he discusses darkness, one of the 10 curses that God sent upon Pharaoh’s Egypt. He shares an interpretation by The Rebbe of Kotzk that is different than most scholars:

It’s not that people did not see one another 
because of the darkness. 
No! It was because they did not see one another 
[that] the darkness existed. 

Their own darkness was the curse in Egypt.²⁴

The prophet Micah says, 

One’s enemies are those of one’s own house.²⁵

When confronted with the challenges of ‘the world we walk through,’ do we remain in the world of paradox, or do we stand in Being? That is, being ‘on the Self,’ consciously awake to Truth? 

Every moment of every day gives us the opportunity to take note of where we stand. Here’s an example of how our viewpoint determines our experience.

A mother tells of the day her pre-teen son injured his arm while snowboarding. It was very painful in certain positions, so while he was quiet, his mother and a friend turned from what was ‘before their eyes’ and acknowledged—in their conscious awareness—basic metaphysical truths.

For example they acknowledged that:

• accidents are unknown to divine consciousness

• nothing can be out of place in the perfection of Being,

• right where the problem seems to be the spiritual fact exists, and 

• divine consciousness, Love, is always guiding, guarding and governing every detail of creation.

Why was their theme consciousness and not an injured arm? Because, as we learn in Kabbalah and in Metaphysical Science,

Understanding and acknowledging 
the facts of existence 
opens up Reality.²⁶ 

— Betty Albee

After some time without evidence of improvement, the mother took her son for an x-ray. The doctor reported that the arm was broken—but that surprisingly it had been perfectly set and was undoubtedly already on the mend. All he had to do was put a cast on it. Soon the boy was back on the half-pipe, cast and all.

Now there’s more to the story. The next day when the mother glanced at herself in the mirror, she was shocked at what she saw. Her two front teeth, which had been misaligned and overlapping as long as she could remember were perfectly positioned as if they had always been that way. They, like the broken arm, were perfectly ‘set.’

Whenever we face something “before our eyes” that doesn’t seem right, isn’t harmonious, or isn’t Godlike, we’re not helpless because while,

That may be the way it looks; 
it is not the way it is.²⁷

— Betty Albee

Standing in Being—being ‘on the Self’—we turn away from the world of paradox “before our eyes,” and consciously acknowledge what is real.  

Rabbi Shapira of the Warsaw Ghetto left a message for us buried in a canister. It says, 

No matter how difficult life becomes, 
we still have it in our power to control how we respond – 
and to face even the hardest of circumstances 
with spiritual growth.²⁸

“This is a powerful legacy that speaks to us across the generations with new urgency today.”²⁹

Let’s review:

Outer depends on inner

The world is as we are

We are the world we walk through

God is Good

God is All

Evil is Not

Hasiddic Rabbi Yanki Tauber says, 

We usually think of the cosmic struggle 
in terms of good versus evil. 

But according to the Kabbalists, 
good and evil 
are but spin-offs of unity and divisiveness. 

G-d is the ultimate oneness, 
and everything G-dly in our world 
bears the stamp of His unity. 

Evil, simply stated, 
is the distortion of this oneness 
by the veil of divisiveness…³⁰

A note of caution! Divisiveness is not the same as diversity. Rabbi Eli Rubin says, 

Divisiveness has its roots 
in the [human] ego’s quest for authority.³¹

Whenever divisiveness rears its head, Absolute Harmony is right there as the spiritual fact of Reality. 

To destroy the veil of divisiveness “before our eyes” and to enter the Holy of Holies, we must consciously be what we really are. As Rabbi Noson Weisz so beautifully reminds us, 

[The Holy of Holies] 
is the holiest space 
in the Jewish world. 

It is also the holiest space 
inside each one of us.³²

The Holy of Holies is pure consciousness, the silence and sanctity—the Source—of thought. The Source of ‘our’ thought.

A quote often attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt says, 

No one can make you feel inferior 
without your consent.³³

Or tired, or angry, or discouraged, or broken, or sick or anything unlike divinity. 

I’m reminded of the story of three baseball umpires. Someone asks, “How do you know if it’s a ball or a strike?”

The junior umpire says, “I call ‘em like they are.”

The senior umpire says, “I call ‘em like I see ‘em.”

The head umpire says, “It ain’t nothin’ ‘till I call it.”³⁴

Whatever comes up in your life—when you ‘call it’—be consciously aware that the place on which you stand is holy ground. 

May the Truth of this ripened Priestly Blessing reverberate in your awareness throughout the year:

The Lord blesses you and keeps you.

The Lord makes his face shine upon you 
and is gracious unto you.

The Lord lifts up his countenance upon you 
and gives you peace.³⁵

Amen. 

Waves of the Ocean

[1] Rabbi Lisa Goldstein, Dreading the High Holy Days https://www.rabbilisagoldstein.com/blog-archive/dreadingthehighholydays • 09.10.20

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Rabbi David Greenstein, A Story of Love and Shame and Love: A Reading of Zohar 1:127a-128b*  PracticalMattersJournal, http://practicalmattersjournal.org/2020/07/28/astoryofloveandshameandlove • 9.16.20

[5] Sheryl Crow, https://genius.com/Sheryl-crow-love-is-all-there-is-lyrics • 9.21.20

[6] https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/52682/jewish/Poor-Reception.htm • 10.15.20

[7] Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics • 11.04.20

[8] Martha Wilcox, The Martha Wilcox Collection, (The Bookmark, 1986), p. 76

[9] Rabbi Benjamin Edidin Scolnic, Temple Beth Shalom, Hamden CT, Where There is No Vision, the People Perish, Proverbs 29:18 KJV https://tbshamden.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=671:directions-sp-921973725&catid=95&Itemid=63 • 09.16.20 

[10] Elie Wiesel: The Rebbe of Ger: A Tragedy in Hasidism | 92nd Street Y Elie Wiesel Archive, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqS8aZr4BpQ&t=100s • 09.15.20

[11] Deuteronomy 9:17 JPS

[12] Originally received via email Eishes Newsletter, August 30, 2001 • see also: Meaningful Life Center, Rising from the Ashes, https://meaningfullife.com/rising-from-the-ashes/ • 09.20.20 see also:  Jewish Wisdom, The Survivor by: Rabbi Y.Y Jacobson. https://www.facebook.com/groups/MazalTov.org/permalink/999840563782145/?comment_id=999845983781603 • 09.20.20

[13]  Daniel Matt, The Essential Kabbalah (HarperSanFrancisco, 1994): p. 24 https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Essential_Kabbalah.html?id=CMIRAQAAIAAJ • 9.15.20

[14]  Joy Hirshberg, Bible Stories for Enlightened Children, (unpublished, 1988)

[15] Betty Albee, Mind is the Athlete: An Exploration of Consciousness and Cause (Institute of Metaphysical Science, 2000), p. 176

[16] https://ericplatt.com/tao-te-ching/ • 09.15.20

[17] Jonathan Star and Shahram Shiva, A Garden Beyond Paradise: The Mystical Poetry of Rumi

[18] Mountains and Waters sutra; another translation: “Before I sought enlightenment, the mountains were mountains and the rivers were rivers. While I sought enlightenment, the mountains were not mountains and the rivers were not rivers. After I reached satori [enlightenment], the mountains were mountains and the rivers were rivers.” https://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~rfrey/116zen.htm#:~:text=%E2%80%9CBefore%20I%20sought%20enlightenment%2C%20the,and%20the%20rivers%20were%20rivers.%E2%80%9D • 09.23.20

[19] Daniel Matt: Exploring Kabbalah, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRX7OEcj1MY • 09.22.20 

[20] Principle of the Science of Creative Intelligence as taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi; see also: The Uncarved Blog, Outer Depends on Inner by Ken and Nathanael Chawkin, https://theuncarvedblog.com/tag/outer-depends-on-inner/ • 9.16.20

[21] Lane Wagger, Speaking Tree, The World is, As You Are, https://www.speakingtree.in/article/the-world-is-as-you-are • 9.16.20 

Also of interest: Rabbi Shemuel ben Nachmani, as quoted in the Talmudic tractate Berakhot (55b.) “We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.” Quote Investigator: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/03/09/as-we-are/#:~:text=There%20is%20a%20saying%20attributed,been%20assigned%20a%20Talmudic%20origin • 9.16.20

[22] Margaret Laird, We Are the World We Walk Through (The Margaret Laird Foundation, 1993)

[23] Gregg Braden, The Divine Matrix: Bridging Time, Space, Mirales, and Belief (Hay House, Inc., 2007), p. 64 • [One’s] replaces “Man's,” [the] replaces “his,” and [ one’s] replaces “his”

[24]  Elie Wiesel: The Rebbe of Ger: A Tragedy in Hasidism | 92nd Street Y Elie Wiesel Archive,  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqS8aZr4BpQ&t=100s • 09.15.20

[25] Micah 7:6 JPS • [One’s] replaces “A man’s,” [those] replaces “the men,” [one’s] replaces “his”

[26] Betty Albee, Mind is the Athlete: An Exploration of Consciousness and Cause (Institute of Metaphysical Science, 2000), p. 190

[27] Ibid., p. 189

[28] Dr. Yvette Alt Miller, How the Rabbi of the Warsaw Ghetto is Giving Me Comfort Today, https://www.aish.com/jw/s/How-the-Rabbi-of-the-Warsaw-Ghetto-is-Giving-Me-Comfort-Today.html?utm_source=Jeeng • 09.12.20

[29] Ibid.

[30]Rabbi Yanki Tauber; based on the Chassidic discourse "Heichaltzu 5659" by Rabbi Shalom DovBer of Lubavitch. Three Divine Echoes: Singularity, Plurality and Oneness, https://www.chabad.org/parshah/article_cdo/aid/3028/jewish/Three-Divine-Echoes-Singularity-Plurality-and-Oneness.htm • 09.15.20

[31] Rabbi Eli Rubin, Purging Divisiveness, Embracing Difference  https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/3800391/jewish/Purging-Divisiveness-Embracing-Difference.htm • 09.25.20

[32] Rabbi Noson Weisz, Holy of Holies, https://www.aish.com/tp/i/m/48971056.html • 09.15.20

[33] Quote Investigator, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/03/30/not-inferior/ • 09.15.20

[34] Kim Albee, Metaphysical Science and the Biology of Belief by Dr. Bruce Lipton https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6daTaGMlkLI • 09.23.20

This post includes updates and edited excerpts
from d’var Torah,
Yom Kippur, 5781
September 28, 2020
Congregation Beth Shalom, Fairfield, Iowa

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