Face Your Journey. Take Possession of The Land of Death and Resurrection: a poetic commentary

Turn around and face the journey that you must take, your jouney into the land of death and resurrection. Take possession of that land where you must undergo your journey. The land that was the place of the Amorites and their neighbors, even as theirs are the ways of false intimacy, the idolatry of the desolate heart, which you, like Adam, have also known and by which you have comforted yourself through the use of degenerate imagination and self-deception. Take possession of that land which lies before you and around you and in your soul, all the way from the south to Lebanon and to the great river, Euphrates, to remind you where your soul was incubated and from where it also has descended. For once your soul walked in Adam with God in the Garden of God as if in His Temple. And how can you return there except through your journey in the land of death and resurrection? For the land that God, your Lord, has given you is the land of death and resurrection for the whole world.

Deuteronomy 1:8 "See! I have given before you the land; come take possession of the land that HaShem swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac, and to Jacob, to give to them and to their children after them."

TORAH TO THE NATIONS

THE GOOD NEWS CAN BE UNDERSTOOD AS THE GIVING OF THE BLESSING OF THE TORAH OF ISRAEL THROUGH THE GRACE OF MASHIACH TO THE NATIONS. WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?

"God came from Sinai, He shone to us from Sei’ir, He appeared from Mount Paran …”

The Zohar elaborates, “… He shone to us from what the children of Sei’ir said – that they are unwilling to accept the Torah …”

Did God redeem Edom from Egypt that He went first to offer Edom the first commandment? No. Rather, this is to say that Adam did not desire to abide in the commandment and Edom also loved the way of rebellion. But as to Israel, he followed the way of his fathers who walked with Hashem.

It has said that God could only offer the Torah to the nations on their purely physical level and that it was when they all rejected it on this level that God offered it to Israel on Israel's more exalted spiritual level but also on the physical level of the nations. It is necessary to understand the concepts of spiritual and physical correctly as they are used here.

So long as we are clear that we are speaking of the covenant of God with Abraham as that which defines Israel as spiritual and the nations as physical or non-spiritual, we can potentially proceed with the correct understanding of what is being taught.

It is not simply that the Torah was not given to the nations because they rejected it, but also that God did not purpose to give the nations the Torah and therefore He hardened them in their rebellion the way He hardened Pharaoh in his personal rebellion against the redemption of Israel and the giving of the Torah to Israel at Sinai.

The Torah is given to the covenant nation because it is the covenant nation. Just as a husband would not give his ring to one who was not his engaged wife and would not give the secret of his plan for life to another than his engaged wife, so God would never have given his Torah to another than to Israel. Nevertheless, by offering the Torah to the nations on their limited level, He demonstrated that His question to them whether they desired His Torah could only be rhetorical. Just as it was a forgone fact that Pharaoh would not desire to obey God and release his slaves to serve God, so it was a forgone fact that the nations would not desire to serve God. But in both of these cases it was beneficial that this should be demonstrated.

And what is most revealing is not the distinction of Israel, but the distinction of God as revealed by Himself from the notions of God as presented by the natural human interest and understanding. Truth and salvation exist only in the word of God being spoken in the voice of God and heard as God would have His word heard.