The Torah, Exodus 20:3 – 20:5: Thou shalt have no other gods before Me. Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, nor any manner of likeness, of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; thou shalt not bow down unto them, nor serve them; for I the LORD thy God Am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate Me; and showing mercy unto the thousandth generation of them that love Me and keep My commandments.

Commandments are considered the basis of the entire human code of the whole human existence. They are acknowledged by all religions, by all societies, and serve as a basis for all social life. However, in Kabbalah, they have a totally different meaning.

In other words, “I am the Only! I am Incorporeal! I cannot be depicted, imagined, or understood! I don’t give you any hints of Who I am! I cannot be put in your pocket, placed in the corner, or hung on the wall. It is impossible to make an amulet out of Me, nor can I be shaped as some kind of a sign! Nothing like that is possible!”

Humans are quite different. A child grabs a toy and doesn’t toss it away for a month or two. It calms him down.

A person goes to a temple, prays, confesses, and cools down. Everything will be all right! For everyone, it’s a medication, a remedy, to settle their worries, a prevention of various social, family, and other problems.

We don’t have anything tangible here. If it is impossible to imagine Him, meaning that there is no one to appeal to, this is a big problem. Does it translate into the fact that there is no God for a regular person who lives in this world? We are unable to visualize Him or sense Him. He is some abstract property of bestowal, something shapeless that fills everything and, at the same time, nothing. What sensors will allow us to reveal Him? We must begin feeling Him one way or another. However, there is nothing around us.

We simply cannot imagine the Lord, the upper power as described in the Torah nor can we establish contact with this force. In order to stay in touch with Him we must grab onto something, appeal to somebody, and portray Him somehow.

Question: Why are these “threads” cut off of us? It’s as if we are floating in the air. Why is that so?

Answer: It’s because we must find Him at a completely different level. We should rise to His degree. Then, we will sense something that we haven’t sensed before and define things that we previously were unable to comprehend. It will become possible because we will acquire a new set of sensors that are called the five Sefirot.

Before we achieve this, there is no such thing as “God” for us. There isn’t anything at all! Of course, there is nature that twists us, pulls us ahead, and plays with us, forces us to continue living, to give birth to someone, controls our behavior in our surroundings and society, and then buries us in the ground. That’s it.

I am exaggerating everything by showing that people have no connection with the Creator or with the Torah whatsoever. That’s why it is said that the Torah is spotless since no one has ever touched it, not even once.

The Torah is a teaching; it’s a spiritual mechanism that is totally disconnected from humans. The fact that we picked it as the source of our beautiful rules and legal laws is very reassuring. Without it, we would just be barbarians.

Nevertheless, I want to emphasize that these rules and laws do not have anything in common with the authentic Torah. We must understand that the Torah’s power, its veracity and the very core of it are not about the rules or laws. It doesn’t matter what we are doing in this world. Rather, what matters is if we happen to rise to the next level where the Creator reveals to us. For that, we don’t need Him to be observable or appear as an image or a phenomenon. Our awareness rises to such a level that we don’t need any images any more since we manage to get out of ourselves.

This explains why the commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me,” comes first, why it is considered a major commandment, and why it precedes all the others. Each subsequent commandment (their order is not random; they are organized in a certain way) delineates the execution of this particular main commandment.

If one cannot observe this commandment, all other commandments are worth nothing. They don’t lead us to the goal. We should constantly keep in mind this primary commandment. For it, we should fulfill all other commandments.
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From KabTV’s, “Mysteries of the Eternal Book” 2/25/13

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