"Death is a Misnomer"
"You are children to Hashem, your Gd- you shall not cut yourselves and
you shall not make a bald spot between your eyes for a dead person."
This is teaching us to be careful not to mourn excessively for those who have deceased and to not self-mutilate.
The dead have not 'ceased,'
they have merely moved on to the next phase of existence.
Sometimes what we see with our eyes is an illusion.
Our sight can deceive us and lead us to believe
that what we see is all that there is.
Moses is telling us to be aware of the limited perception of our eyes.
Our eyesight merely sees the physical and not the spiritual world.
We are given free choice to seek out today and every day the transcendent,
to search for the divine, to look beyond the material and
to have a consciousness of God.
We have the freedom to acknowledge that there are worlds in existence that we can't experience or understand while we are limited by and locked into our physical bodies.
Our soul, which is pure energy, comes from the 'world of souls.'
Our body, the home for our soul in this phase of existence, comes from the earth.
Death is the moment when our soul starts to be released from and
is no longer 'locked' into the body which has housed it and at the same time limited it.
Our soul in the higher realms can 'know' and 'see'
from one end of the universe to the other.
Our soul never stops existing, never dies, never stops being.
Our tradition teaches that our soul will one day rejoin with its earthly body once again.
One day we will reunite with all those who have predeceased us.
Death is merely a temporary separation, of the soul from its body and
of living from the dead.
So don't mourn excessively because it is unwarranted.
That does not make our grief any less real.
We mourn deeply and rawly for our loved ones who we can no longer touch or interact with.
We live with loss and at the same time we are enjoined to have an awareness that our loved ones have merely moved on Into another realm of being.
There is so much to 'see' which cannot be known by our eyes.
May we use this time to learn to feel, hear, intuit, and
connect to the spiritual worlds that surround us and infuse our reality.
Shabbat shalom and much love
Elissa
Art by Yoram Raanan
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