To See With God’s Eyes: The Story of Abraham: Marc Gafni
To See With God’s Eyes: Marc Gafni
Someone once said that reading the Bible in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil. To touch the mystery of Hebrew mysticism, you need to touch your lips to the original words themselves. The key word describing the spiritual work in the temple ritual is ra’ah, meaning “seeing” or “perception.”
For the biblical mystics the word is alive — pregnant with meaning and history. When they wanted to understand the layers of an idea, they would look for the key word most associated with the concept and from there proceed. In our case of the key word is ‘ra’ah’.
The mystics trace the biography of the word ra’ah to its point of origin, and travel along with it for part of its journey. The first stop on the journey in search of the secret of ra’ah is a meeting with Abraham, the nomad mystic warrior of the book of Genesis.
Why Abraham, you ask?
Because the only person in the biblical myth who is described as a lover of the spirit is Abraham. “Abraham the Lover is his appellation,” the prophet Isaiah says of him. And now that we understand that Love is a perception, we are not at all surprised that the key verb used to describe his life is none other than Ra’ah. But let us see what this word of perception means in order to really know what it means to be a lover.
Let’s learn.
There is a spellbinding tale in Genesis 22 which takes place towards the end of Abraham’s spiritual unfolding. Abraham is no longer the novice he was at the beginning of his spiritual quest. He has already been called upon by God once and answered the call with clarity and alacrity. That first call had sounded out to him in the prime of his youth with the strange biblical phrase, “Lech Lecha” — literally translated as “Go! To You!”. While the literary readers reinterpret the phrase as but a dramatic form of command, “Abraham — You must go!”
Abraham is called by God to journey from Padam Aram to the Land of Canaan. The Zohar however reads the text as it is written, “Go to yourself.” The geographic relocation is important only if it reflects an inner journey to the most interior spirit-scapes of Abraham’s soul… a journey towards self.
Now, in his later years, the call comes again to Abraham. “Lech Lecha — Go to yourself! Go to the place, to the mountain of Moriah.”
Book ends.
Avraham’s spiritual life begins with a lech lecha call. Lecha — go to yourself. A call to spiritual adventure. His final path is likewise introduced with the same call, ‘Lech Lecha’. The two stories are in reality one. The second completes the first.
To unpack the truth underlying Abraham’s destination, we need to compare more closely how the second story differs from the first. We read the text of biblical myth no less carefully than we need to read the texts of our own lives. We look for nuance. We are sensitive to patterns. What is the same and what is different? In what way has Abraham changed or grown towards being a lover?
The very fact that both stories use the unique phrase “Lech Lecha” — Go to your Self — a phrase which does not appear anywhere else in the Bible — already marks them as one story. The second indication is that God’s commandment in both stories is prefaced by a tripartite phrase. The first story builds, “Go, from your land, your birthplace, your father’s house,” just as the second story builds, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love.” Thirdly, the destination is similar. In the first story Abraham goes to Elon Moreh and in the second to Mount Moriah.
Both are words which are related to the Hebrew word for seeing, vision and perception.
The point of the parallel structure is to tell you that Abraham is here completing a circle. He is finishing a process he began ten chapters before. The two “Go forth to yourself” episodes are the bookends of the Abraham story.
Beyond Divine Show and Tell
In his first lech lecha test, Abraham was not yet a lover. Why? He lacked perception. At the very beginning of his spiritual journey, God served as the eyes of Abraham: God told Abraham to go to the land “that I will show you.” God shows Abraham the place, the Hebrew root for the word “show” being identical to the root of the word “see.” (Genesis 12:2)
At this juncture, Abraham cannot see, only God can see.
But now, (undergoing his final test – this is not brought up earlier..why now?), Abraham is in a different place. God tells him lech lecha — go to offer up Isaac, “on one of the mountains that I will tell you.” The seeing, vision, word which appeared in the earlier story is gone. God is no longer the one who sees for Abraham. Abraham no longer needs God to show him. When the time comes, Abraham is able to “see” the place for himself. As the text says: “On the third day, Abraham looked up and saw the place from afar.”(Genesis 22:4)
Abraham has emerged. He can see he has attained perception. At the beginning of his journey, he could only find the “place” if, in a divine act of show and tell, God saw and told him where to go. Yet at this point God does not even tell him where the “place” is — Abraham is able to see it for himself.
And so it is when we begin our journeys — clergy, psychologists, and spiritual advisors are enormously important; and in some sense we are always at the beginning and we all need guides. The goal is to arrive at a place where we have our own perception. When we are able to see the “place” ourselves.
Later in the story, after Abraham has reached autonomy — that is, seeing the “place” himself — Isaac, full of foreboding, asks him, “Here are the firestone and the wood; but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” Abraham replies enigmatically, “God will show us the lamb for the offering, my son.” “Show” here is again that Hebrew word Ra-ah. God will show us means “God will see for us.” This is troubling, to say the least.
Here in regard to the animal to be used as a sacrifice, a textual symbol for spiritual decisions, it is not Abraham but God again who is able to see. If the whole point of Abraham’s journey was to arrive at his having independent vision, then this would seem to be a sudden and serious regression.
Yet, the enigma resolves itself stunningly with a powerful spiritual teaching in the very next verse. According to the text, it is Abraham and not God who finally finds the alternative sacrifice on the mountain: “Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw a ram.” Although the text specifically says that God is the one who will see the alternative sacrifice, in fact it is Abraham who sees it. The point: Abraham now has divine perception; he can see “with God’s eyes.”
Seeing with God’s eyes – that is the perception that love is all about.
Love, Fear and …
Mystic philosopher Isaac of Homil radically interprets the phrase, “He saw the picture of God” to mean, not that Moses has a mystical vision of divinity and sees a picture of God, but that, far more powerfully, Moses sees the picture that God saw. Moses sees with God’s eyes. In fact, the Hebrew phrase for awe or Fear of God is Yiraat Elokim.
The word Yirah, fear, derives from the very same root as the word for seeing. The reason simply is that the experience of fear, when not crippling, causes a heightening of perception and expands the field of vision.
Fear of God then really means the perception of God. The word “of” in both phrases, “Picture of God” and “fear of God,” can be read in two ways.
The first refers to our seeing of God. The second refers to our seeing the same as God. When we become divine miniatures, seeing with God’s eyes.
Now do you see what just happened? The whole split in our lives between love and fear was just healed. The word “fear” means “seeing” — but only the first level of vision. *(clarify) The higher level of perception is to see someone with God’s eyes. This is on the level of love. Thus, both fear and love are in the same family of divine perception.
This is the great evolution of the word Ra’ah — its highest and most ecstatic point. To see the picture of God.
marc gafni
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