It’s time everyone understood what Judaism is really all about.
Judaism … is about love.

If you’re against Judaism, you’re against love.
If you want to harm Judaism, you want to harm love.
If you’re afraid of Jews, you’re afraid of being loved.

Many years ago Jews were given a task:
To discover the deepest love that’s within every soul, and then to share this love with the whole world.
But the world didn’t want to know about this love.
They tried to remove it from their countries.
They were afraid of this love.
They were afraid of being loved.

We found this love in our own hearts and wanted to share it with the world.
We wanted to reveal the love that can be found in every single person on earth, to encourage compassion toward all of life.

I ask the world: Are you really afraid of the love we have to offer?
A beautiful love is already waiting for you within your own soul.

In this week’s parsha, Va’eira, Moses begins to hear God’s voice and learns that God wants him to speak to Pharaoh. He’s beginning to be trained and guided in what he needs to do to save the Children of Israel from slavery.

We’re all experiencing training as we go through life, even if it feels, sometimes, like we’re getting nowhere. Ultimately, we need to become partners in the creative process of life. This means that we have to first learn how to live in a way that every act we make, every conversation we have, is one of love, creating balance and harmony on the planet. This can help us to experience the loving presence of the higher consciousness of God, so that we can begin to express this love in the world with our words and our deeds. Then we can begin to experience the joy that comes with giving love.

This is what will bring us into relationship, and eventually partnership with God. We can become partners in the creative process, which is an intention to keep the world in harmony, improving it whenever and wherever possible. When we’re ready to release our feelings of separateness, and diminish the need to be right all the time, we can find that there’s an overall loving guidance that can arise from within our own essence. The universe is really constantly designing every element of life. God knows who we are and what we need, and is giving us the honor of being able to receive it and transform it into love for all of life.

Please join us in The Listening Room this Shabbat to discuss teachings from Rav Kook, Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, Rabbi Pinson, and others, on this understanding. Then we’ll follow with a short, silent meditation on the Shema.

Although the latest news is leading us to believe otherwise, this world is made for love. Love is the center of all things. It’s the essence of every moment of happiness. Everyone needs love. From the moment we are born, it’s only the nourishment of love that makes us feel complete. If we think that love is outside of our self, we might notice a lack of love in our life, but when we discover that we each carry an abundance of love deep within our own soul, we can experience our delightful connection to this love every day.

In Leviticus 19:18, “You shall love your fellow as yourself,” we learn that we have to first find love within our own self before we can love others. When we come to realize that every person on earth is an instrument of love, we’ll be ready to reach into our heart to experience it. This is the reason for meditation; it can open a portal to reveal how close we are to this love.

Please join us in The Listening Room this Shabbat to discuss teachings from Rabbi Nachman, Rav Kook, and Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, on this understanding. Then we’ll follow with a short, silent meditation on the Shema.