Sitting on the Keys

In truth, the world, standing on its own, is a place of exile and captivity.

Even when a man stands upright on the tallest mountain and perceives all there is to perceive, comprehends all that can be comprehended, achieves a realization of the Ultimate Oneness and Void that is behind all this --

But in the end, he is still stuck on the ground where his feet have brought him, his eyes have not seen beyond his own eyeballs, his mind has only comprehended that which he can know and reached that which is reachable --he has remained within his own self.

And the proof:
he has remained with a G-d Who is above
and an earth which is below, and the two cannot meet.

Rabbi Tzvi Freeman
Bringing Heaven Down to Earth series
Liberated by Betrothal

Man is separated from God. I know that's not what you wanted to hear, but for a thousand reasons, some of which you may know, we cannot ascend to God and God does not descend to us, at least in any way we can comprehend. Oh we try to reach God. We try to summon Him. We pray. We plead in our anguish. We cry out in our loneliness. But sometimes the only answer is silence.

Or so it seems.

What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures. -James 4:1-3

The brother of the Master tells us that our selfishness and humanity get in the way of our prayers to God. In many ways, we are like the prostitute/wife of the Prophet Hosea, faithless and wandering after other lovers. Yet, we see a picture of God toward a faithless Israel in Hosea 3 that reminds us of ourselves:

The LORD said to me, “Go, show your love to your wife again, though she is loved by another man and is an adulteress. Love her as the LORD loves the Israelites, though they turn to other gods and love the sacred raisin cakes.”

So I bought her for fifteen shekels of silver and about a homer and a lethek of barley. Then I told her, “You are to live with me many days; you must not be a prostitute or be intimate with any man, and I will behave the same way toward you.”

For the Israelites will live many days without king or prince, without sacrifice or sacred stones, without ephod or household gods. Afterward the Israelites will return and seek the LORD their God and David their king. They will come trembling to the LORD and to his blessings in the last days. -Hosea 3:1-5

Though we are faithless to God, He is faithful to us. Though we are unworthy, we will be redeemed.

This message should be very clear to us as we approach the time of Passover. The Children of Jacob were enslaved and through no power of their own, God sent a Savior and a Prophet to free and redeem them. The end of Rabbi Freeman's message which I quoted, but not in it's entirety, tells the message:

His only liberation, and the only liberation of the entire world, is when the One Above reaches down and tells us, "Do this. With this deed you are betrothed to Me."

And then there is no above and below. Then there is only One.

We cannot reach God on our own strength, but He does reach down to us. We, the entire world, are "betrothed" to Him and through that betrothal, there is only One. It sounds very much like this:

I will betroth you to me forever;
I will betroth you in righteousness and justice,
in love and compassion.
I will betroth you in faithfulness,
and you will know the LORD. -Hosea 2:19-20

This set of verses from the writings of the Prophet Hosea are also part of the blessings a Jew says when donning hand tefillin before prayer. You might say that the messages here of the Prophet and certainly of Rabbi Freeman, are intended only for the Jewish people, but the coming of the Messiah opens the door for the rest of humanity.

Let us rejoice and be glad
and give him glory!
For the wedding of the Lamb has come,
and his bride has made herself ready.
Fine linen, bright and clean,
was given her to wear.” -Revelation 19:7-8

There are numerous "marital metaphors" in the Bible referring to Israel as the bride of God and the disciples of the Messiah (Jews and Gentiles) as the bride of Christ. All who join ourselves to the Messiah, both Israel and the nations, have a part in the life of the world to come. However, although this is abundantly available to us, escaping our slavery requires our willingness. Rabbi Freeman has a commentary about this, too:

Man, on his own, cannot reach higher than his own fingertips. He cannot break out of his own skin, he cannot lift himself up by pulling at his own hair. All of his achievements are tied to his ego. All that he may comprehend is defined by his own subjective perception. He is a prisoner by virtue of existence.

So G-d threw Man a rope. He gave him tasks to fulfill that are beyond his grasp, thoughts to fathom that take him outside the hollow of his subjective universe. All that is needed is his willingness to leave himself.

We are all prisoners. But we sit on the keys.

He is the vine and we are the branches (John 15:5) and we can do anything if we are united with him, which includes escaping our chains. Sometimes however, we slump down in our jail cell, dejected and discouraged; lamenting our imprisonment and fearing we will never be free. Ironically, that freedom is always available to us. We just need to get up and see that, as Rabbi Freeman points out, we are sitting on the keys.

The road is long and often, we travel in the dark.