Good Morning Yamon Ki Yesepar;
Psalm 24:7: “Lift up your heads, O gates, and be lifted up, on ancient doors, that the King of glory may come in.”
The pashat seems clear. David is picturing God as a conquering king returning from battle and passing through the gates of the city to his palace. But, as we should always ask ourselves, is there a deeper meaning to this verse?
There is a short commentary in an ancient rabbinical work on this verse. When you translate it directly from the Aramaic, it almost rings poetic. “Through these gates, supernal rungs, known to us the Blessed One becomes.”
What the sages are teaching is that when you pass through these gates the unknown will become the known. The word for gate is “s’ara.” The sages have an Aramaic word “sefirot (to count)” as in the 10 Sefirots, that is derived from this word. The teaching is that there are ten gates to knowing the hidden mysteries of God. Actually, they are ten attributes of God.
Keter – Will
Binah – Understanding
Hokhmah – Wisdom
Gevurah – Power
Hesed – Love
Tif’eret – Beauty (compassion)
Hod – Splendor (prophecy)
Netsah – Eternity
Yesod – Foundation (righteousness)
Shekhinah – The Presence of God
One note of interest is that five of the attributes are masculine, and five are feminine. Can you guess which are which? (the ones ending in “ah” are feminine) We Christians tend to focus so much on the masculine nature of God, yet, for thousands of years the Jewish sages taught the feminine nature of God as well. Father – Mother and Husband – Wife.
What we are to do with this is apply these attributes to our study of the Word of God. The sages believe that the Word of God is read as one continuous divine name. Hence a seemingly insignificant verse can reveal the hidden dynamics of the nature and attributes of God. Look and meditate on the verse above. Do you see the “will” of God in this verse? How about understanding, wisdom, power, love, beauty etc. If you mediate on a verse long enough you will find one or a number of the attributes of God in every verse of the Bible. His signature is in every verse.
There is the story of a young woman who was introduced to a young man. It turned out this man was a writer and had just published his first book. The woman was not too impressed, especially when she discovered he was a writer of science fiction. She hated science fiction. He gave her a copy of his book which she put on a shelf and forgot about. But she did not forget about the young writer. They began dating, fell in love and were soon engaged to be married. The night of her engagement she sat in bed thinking about this man she was to marry. Who was this strange man, what was he all about? Then she remembered his book. She ran to the shelf, picked up this book filled with short stories of science fiction (which she hated), dusted it off and began to read. She read every word of the book and stayed up all night reading through the book three times, never putting it down. Sounds strange for someone who hated science fiction. Why was she now interested in this book? Because she fell in love with it’s author.
The sages may shroud their writings with a lot of mystical, coded, mysterious words, but ultimately what they are saying is that if you love God enough, He will reveal His secrets to you. If you truly love Him you will find His attributes in every book, chapter, verse, word and, yes, every letter of the Holy Scriptures.
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