Exodus
My name is Rafaëlle Cohen and I am part of the Jewish people. Thankfully my family never resonated with any dogmatic ways of living, there weren’t rules regarding our judaism, just invitations. We were always about honoring the traditions in a celebratory way, more so to enjoy beautiful moments with our grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles than anything else. However, I greatly appreciate that my father transmitted me the pleasure in discovering the meanings behind these traditions. I absolutely love to dive into the stories of the Torah and look for a message, an insight, a key to human life I hadn’t seen before.
I believe the Torah is a channeled text full of keys, hidden there for humans to reflect on and live by (the Kabbalah’s purpose is to decipher them). I personally love to tune in to the stories of the Torah and inquire my own personal built-in Kabbalah: my intuitive reading. And when I listen carefully, I discover a myriad of clues, deep keys for humanity. All different aspects of the one and only message: We Are Oneness.
Two days ago, Pessah started: the story of Moses, the story of Liberation. So I did what I always do: I shone the message of Light into the prism of the Exodus story, and these are the colours that came out:
So it is said: “Yesterday we were slaves in Egypt, tomorrow we will be free in Israël”.
For me the story of Pessah is actually a metaphor for something that happens to every single human in every single moment.
Most of us humans, whether we are aware of it or not, have been slaves to an inner Pharaoh for centuries, just like in the story. And who is that Pharaoh, that inner Egypt of ours, if not the fears that do not serve us anymore, the wounded ego, the conditionings, the limiting beliefs that we inherited, or acquired through trauma, the unconscious painful behavioural patterns we can’t seem to get out of, things that we DO NOT NEED anymore and yet that somehow seem to rule our lives, making decisions for us, thus keeping us in internal slavery.
Another way of seeing being slaves in Egypt, completely tied to the first aspect, is to be enslaved to the illusion of separation that we live in. In our world, I am me, you are you, we are seemingly separate, therefore to a certain extent we are a threat to one another. By the way, the Egyptians at the time had several separate gods that they idolised, which is the pinnacle of separation. In our human experience, this belief in separation goes hand in hand with a feeling of total powerlessness, and therefore with an inevitable desire to have control over another… like over slaves (or over something like an invisible virus, for example).
In the story, only when a Hebrew man was ready to stand up for his people did God decide to speak to him. Only then did God strongly and firmly, sometimes violently, take action in order to restore freedom to the Hebrews.
And here it is, shiny and sparkly for us to see, the key, the great invitation:
There is also only one way for humans to free ourselves from those fears that do not serve us anymore, and from the bondage to the illusion of separation: it requires great determination, and a burning love of self, to strongly and firmly say NO to old patterns, and move into a higher, joyous, blissful, and FREE way of living. It requires becoming the witness to those fears and those pains, being present to them, bringing only awareness to them. A LOT of non-doing. And that is a very difficult thing to do for humans who until now have only known to react, control, find solutions, and resist, but it takes a lot of fire and determination to decide to merely Trust, to do nothing but be Present to our pains and fears.
It requires something as strong as say… knowing our divinity.
Just like the Hebrews had known slavery for centuries and centuries. What we resist for centuries persists for centuries, until we cannot suffer anymore, and it is only when a power as strong as God rises, hears the People, and takes action, with a determination as strong as the plagues, that the Hebrews initiate their journey to freedom.
The same way, knowing our Oneness and remembering it continuously with determination has the power to wash away the oppressors within us, with the force of the entire red sea.
The ultimate beauty of this is that remembering who we truly are, freeing ourselves from the bondage to the illusion of separation, has the ability to free the slaves AND the oppressors at the same time. It frees humanity from the whole game of having to have control over another altogether. If we are all One, there is no true other to have power over!
We ALL have the ability to go from power games to the beautiful power of sharing, the beautiful power of compassion, of connecting. It is a matter of remembering who we truly are. The story of exodus is more applicable now than ever because we are all being forced into places of surrender where we are not in control, not even over the air we’re breathing.
Every single human in every single moment has the power to get out of Egypt, by inviting Presence in, by Trusting in the Eternal Oneness. The message is all over the Torah if you read it carefully. And when we Trust, that is when “God prevails”, which literally means Israel in Hebrew. Yesterday we were slaves in Egypt, tomorrow we shall be free in Israel.