Who Are You, Really? – Rabbi Yehoshua Simons

The Torah says that Hashem has a hand. But isn't this just a metaphor? The Torah also says that Hashem loves us. But how can he have an imperfect human emotion? And what has this got to do with our relationship with him? If you think you really love and Hashem doesn't, you've got it backwards. In this video series, my goal is to release your mind and soul to be able to freely think about Hashem in the way the Torah talks about him. This discussion around Hashem's essence is going to launch us to new heights right out of the galaxy. If Hashem's essence is unknowable, how can his Torah be a revelation of him? If his emotions and will are expressions, [music] how can they still be one with him? In this episode, we explore how Torah and mitzvot are not just divine instructions, they are divine revelations. We'll learn how Hashem's will flows directly from his essence and how your choices connect not just to a level of God but to Hashem himself. So finally, let's get a good hold of the difference between essence and expression by looking at ourselves. There's a very good exercise we can all do. Try this. Ask yourself, what are the things that I have, my expressions versus what is me, my actual self, my actual essence? One way to tell the difference is what I call the essence test. If you can say my about it, then it isn't you. My body clearly not me. Most people, especially women, instinctively know that I am not my body, right? My love, that too, not the essence. We already explained that your love is something that you have, something that you feel, something that you do, not what you are. How about my soul? Right? You may have heard that your soul is the real you, but even that isn't quite accurate. It still fails the essence test. [music] If it's my soul, then it's something that you possess, not something that is your deepest root. We learn in Cabala that your soul consists of what you know and what you feel, your faculties and traits. But all of these change over time. We are taught that they're more like level shim to the higher levels. You can learn more, feel differently, grow, fall, change, and that you still remain you. Even if a person fundamentally changes through oral by losing their memory, dementia, Alzheimer's, we still say that they are the same person. We don't erase their name. We don't nullify their right. We don't force them to get divorced. Why? Because the essence, the eye is still there. We still see them as the same person fundamentally. They are a person, maybe a damaged person or [music] a changed, transformed person, but they're still the same ultimate core of who they are. It's still them. Still, what you know and what you feel do in some sense define you, right? They are close close to the real you. So, what's closer? your will. The cabala says that the root of the root of your soul is your will, your rats on your keter. You can tell a lot about somebody by what they want. Especially our most essential core [music] desires and values. But still, if you think about it, even that is not truly you. It's my will, not me. And thus fails the essence [music] test too. What's higher than will? Not much actually. The cabala and theut tell us that even within will there are levels. There is the will. Higher than that is desire and pleasure still is higher. And higher than that is the the essential need the core identity. The unchanging part of your soul that simply is that doesn't operate through faculties or desires. This is practically all the way there. In fact, the sometimes is described as the real you in the but we learn that there are higher levels too. When it comes to the real you, the one who wants, the one who knows, the one who experiences, feels with a soul that fills a body. What is that? The answer is that we haven't got words for it. It's ineffable. It's indivisible. There's only one of you. Can't be changed. Can't be divided. can't be described. Not composite but one. Not located in any place in particular. Not limited. You were given 10 spirat but maybe you could be given more. Sound familiar? It should. That's exactly howus and even theim [music] describe the essence of hashem. We are now describing the philosophical category of essence which is the main topic as well as the central topic of even we have an essence as I've been saying all along and it is that essence of ours that does all of these actions such as desiring experiencing feeling knowing. Indeed, now you see what I mean. If we can truly desire know and love so can Hashem, right? This is not the difference between us i.e that we can love and feel and he does not as clarifies in the difference between us and him is one of scale and distance only. Even though that scale and distance is truly beyond infinite such that the Rambam rightly calls it a homonym. It's still a connected line from bottom to top. And that's the real meaning of what it means that Hashem is one and that the Simsum is loc. Another thing that we learned through doing this exercise is that expression and essence are not truly separated after all. They are connected in a wondrous way that allows our expressions to truly become authentic revelations of the essence. They connect from your body to your heart to your mind to your soul to your will your keter and then the soul of your soul and then in a line a chain unbroken cause and effect. It eventually interfaces directly with essence where it makes a remarkable leap that is beyond cause and effect but nonetheless true and real connected without being connected in any way that we can say. We are going from things to essence. And essence isn't describable as a what, but as a who. We use words like you and me. Him, love, someone, not something. That's really what essence is. Who, not what, someone, not something. We have learned that you can reveal who you are and your very essence through your expressions bit by bit, expression by expression, as we will explain in more detail soon. But to summarize, who not what? When it comes to the what of essence, we can't even grasp our own. Let's be real, who knows what an eye is or a self is. Leave it to the philosophers. And if we can't understand our own, then surely we can't understand Hashem's. It's all philosophy abstract distant and frankly most people even brilliant minds should approach this with extreme caution. Many have ered here even gdoleim and I don't say this lightly or on my own authority of course not seed brings it we've seen it in history just look at the debates between great gdollim around simum capes versus loash or the confusion surrounding the spirat hashem's names and the nature of divine attributes these mistakes have done real damage hence this whole series for example to undo one of the damages that have been done the one where we've pushed Hashem into a mystical box labeled ineffable where we stopped thinking about him and seeing him as real. We swept him away into mystery assuming that if he's beyond definition, he must also be beyond relationship. But that's a mistake for Kurt. When it comes to the who we can get to know him precisely because the created world of expression the spherat go all the way up to the hidden root in atmud like we proved before and now hopefully everybody should understand through his Torah he reveals his expressions [music] to us personally intimately and fully as we know from the sources every letter of Torah reveals him his very essence we get to know him through his expressions what he does what he says says what he thinks, what he feels, what he knows and what he wants. Mitzvot you. This is Torah. This is his ratson. What he wants, this is the highest expression revealing the most about him. Like we said, and we can understand this because as we said, this is true of us too. What we want, what we need is the highest expression of us so long as we're being authentic. All the more with Hashem. Rambam in the mor 313 tells us something profound. His will is identical with his essence. There's a perfect mapping one to one. He is being infinitely and perfectly authentic. Ble z. This amazing perfection of his means that every single level of expression for him, every world, every level of the seda hisha, the spiritual cosmos and even every atom in the physical world is a true expression of his ultimate unified will and essence. So in this episode, we learned how Hashem's will, his ratson, is not something layered on top of him per se. It flows directly from his very self. That's why every single detail in creation, even the smallest moment in your life, is not separate from him. And in the next episode, we're going to go more into explaining the depth of his will [music] and explain how he does have one simple will. Just like he is one, so too his will is one. And we will explain how we can have such if there are so many details in the creation that he wills on a daily basis. And finally, we will also reveal what that will is. we hinted at in this episode. More on that next episode. Stay tuned.