3 Not with our ancestors did YHWH make this BRIT but with us who are alive and are here today. [1]3. with us—we who are here today, all of us alive. The heavy emphasis of Moses’s language, in which, exceptionally, “us” in the accusative is followed by “we” in the nominative and then … Continue reading
Deuteronomy 5
The commanding words were pronounced as the generations all perceived them at once. Clear words resound slowly off the mountains, through the valleys and wadis of history accelerating to meet our minds of today and onward.
5 I stood between YHWH and you at that time to tell you the word of YHWH because you were terrified to the fire and you did not go up onto the mountain…
Deuteronomy 5
Moshe exclaims: No weary, aged prophet am I standing once again in front of the people. No mountain shows my trail and no desert has my footprints etched in it. FEEL the presence of history. It is hovering above around, to guide us each and every day.
1 To the leader, Maskil [2]meaning of the Hebrew is uncertain of the sons of Korach. 2 As a deer yearns for streams of water so does my spirit yearn for God. 3 My spirit is thirsty for God.
Psalm 42
What creatures are we to seek this contact or even to desire it and yet recoil and retreat from it at the same time?
5 I stood between YHWH and you at that time to tell you the word of YHWH because you were terrified to the fire and you did not go up onto the mountain…
Deuteronomy 5
Fire might be the best image for the revelation of the 10 Commandments. Flames attract and repel us at the same time. The energy from all of that light will be constant somewhere else in this universe that retains all energy as it transmutes it. Stand up! Move closer! Let it touch your face!
18 These are the words that YHWH spoke to your whole assembly from out of the fire, the cloud and the fog in a huge voice and nothing more, written on two stone tablets and given to me. [3]Theology 19 When you heard the voice from out of the darkness and the mountain burning with fire, all of the heads of the tribes and the elders came to me. 20 You said thus: we have seen YHWH our God, his presence, his greatness and we heard his voice from out of the fire; on this day we saw that God can speak to a human and the human can survive.
Deuteronomy 5
Can the commandments, the ancient dictums, have meaning for us? Anyone, at any time in history or in the space-time continuum, can perceive that illuminated day of days, as these ancient phrases charged at those present and then expanded into the cosmos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrC8iY6_aZQ
Meditation and the 10 Commandments
- Meditation begins as we let the mundane daily life fall away…
- Listen for the sound of the expanding consonants and vowels turning into syllables, like light waves/particles emerging from a distant star.
- We let the letters enter our closed eyes.
- They form words that lift our senses to another plane.
- Someone may sing but they echo beyond every present day voice.
- They swirl like the ancient chant crosses through air.
- The essence of these words will always rise off the ancient scroll.
- They reach our ancestors and we are all instantly merged with our descendants.
- We are one in these seconds surrounded by these words – our standards and our challenge.
- Keep the words in your heart as you open your eyes and begin to move about in the world.
Study them and find their eternal meaning.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7511255
Midrash Harabah and English translations by Rabbi Gail Shuster-Bouskila ©2021
References
| ↑1 | 3. with us—we who are here today, all of us alive. The heavy emphasis of Moses’s language, in which, exceptionally, “us” in the accusative is followed by “we” in the nominative and then the triple language of spatial and temporal presence, “here,” “today,” “alive,” powerfully dramatizes the logic of reenactment at the heart of Deuteronomy. This book is framed as a renewal, through rehearsal, of the law. Its initial seventh-century B.C.E. audience is constantly invited to imagine itself in the shoes, or sandals, of the Israelites who stood before Moses just east of the Jordan as he repeated the law. Moses’s rhetoric, in turn, repeatedly evokes the physical, witnessing presence of the audience he addresses as he reiterates the divine law revealed a generation earlier at Sinai. Alter, Robert. The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary (p. 1118). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition. |
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| ↑2 | meaning of the Hebrew is uncertain |
| ↑3 | Theology |