Living in Divine Space

Chassidut teaches us to construct a spiritual cube around our consciousness, protecting and directing us.

Based on the teachings of Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh

Constant Commandments

Among the 613 commandments of the Torah, there are six special commandments that are deemed “constant,” meaning they must be observed at every moment.¹ These commandments are not tied to specific actions but express six feelings or beliefs that everyone who serves God must cherish and maintain in their hearts at all times. Therefore, they are also known by the name “the duties of the heart.”

The six constant commandments of the heart are as follows:

1. To believe in the existence and providence of God.

2. Not to believe in other gods besides Him.

3. To believe that God is one, in complete and indivisible unity.

4. To love God.

5. To fear God.

6. To guard one’s thoughts from negative reflections.

One of the places where these commandments are listed is a book called Sefer HaChinuch, which details all 613 commandments. When Sefer HaChinuch lists these commandment it also provides us with a metaphor that can help us better understand them: it calls them “cities of refuge.” The source of this expression lies in the Torah’s instruction to establish six cities to serve as a refuge for anyone who accidentally kills another person and flees from the avenger of blood.² Anyone who kills by mistake must flee to them; as long as he is there, he cannot be harmed, and he must live there until his deed is atoned for.

The concept of an avenger of blood is foreign to our culture, making it difficult for us to connect to the whole idea of cities of refuge. However, every commandment in the Torah has an inner spiritual level that we can identify with more easily. The inner meaning of murder is the conscious effacement of the image of God—both of the murdered and of the murderer. Accidental killing, therefore, spiritually means unconsciously forgetting the image of God. When we divert our attention from Godliness and mistakenly think that the world exists by chance, we are metaphorically “killing” the divine image within us, the image of God in which man was created. According to this interpretation, the cities of refuge symbolize places or states where this distraction can be corrected—returning a person to full awareness of the divine presence in creation.

From here we can understand the correlation between the cities of refuge and the six constant commandments: like the cities, these commandments are meant to protect us from forgetting that we are God’s creations. Cherishing them in our hearts builds a kind of spiritual refuge around us that prevents our consciousness from scattering and allows us to focus on God’s presence in our lives.

Living in a Divine Space

Let us now try to translate the concept of the six constant commandments as cities of refuge into a meditative contemplation.

One way of doing this is creating a visual image that can illustrate it. Comparing the commandments of the heart to a mental refuge we build around us means correlating the six commandments with the six spatial directions—above, below, right, left, forward, and backward—and then imagining the commandments as surrounding us from all sides.

As we shall now see, the six commandments perfectly align with the six spatial directions.

Above: Belief in God’s existence and providence

The commandment of faith is the most fundamental among the Torah’s commandments, as well as the first of the Ten Commandments (“I am the Lord your God,”³ which is understood as the commandment to believe in God). Although God is omnipresent, the intuitive human instinct is to think of Him as being above us, as in the phrases “Our Father in Heaven” and “Know what is above you.” The reason for this is that the ground is a symbol of physicality while the sky is a symbol of spirituality.⁴

Placing faith in God above us instills in us the basic feeling that there is someone who watches over us and protects us, who sees all our deeds and can guide us. It opens a metaphorical portal above us towards which we can lift our head, raise it above the tumultuous waters of this world, and take a breath of faith before diving back in. Additionally, it reminds us that God sees the world from a bird’s-eye view, revealing that the maze of our lives has form and order, and that our troubles are not in vain but are meant to help us get closer to a certain goal in our future.

Below: Denial of belief in other gods

The second commandment follows the first, as it is the second of the Ten Commandments: “You shall have no other gods before Me.”⁵ Other gods are primarily idols, but more broadly, they refer to all the forces and people in the world that we tend to sanctify or develop dependence on. The prohibition of idolatry is essentially the prohibition of placing our trust in idols—making them the ground we stand on. Therefore, we should place this commandment beneath us. In doing so, we metaphorically replace the image of relying on idols with the image of stepping on them and smashing them.

One might argue that this commandment is redundant because it is included in the first: if we are to believe in God, it means not to believe in other gods. The fact that it is nonetheless established as a separate commandment teaches us that psychologically, we can indeed believe in both God and idols, hence the need for two separate commandments. We have a tendency to live in a sort of split personality—placing God in the heavens, while on earth, we rely on other, more accessible forces. The purpose of this commandment is precisely to bring God down from the heavens to the earth, to instill in our hearts that He not only watches over us from above but also supports us and serves as a foundation for everything that happens on earth.

Forward: Belief in God’s unity

After building the metaphorical ceiling and floor of our divine space, we are ready to look forward. What must stand before us at all times is the simple content of the Shema calling: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.”⁶ The intended experience upon opening our eyes and looking around is that we are one thing, a subject, and the world and others standing before us are another thing, an object. Contrary to this apparent experience, this commandment asks us to hear (“Hear, O Israel”) a more subtle and internal truth, a “still small voice,”⁷ that all existence is one. Through this belief we should look at the world, contemplating how everything has meaning, affects us and requires our judgment and response. Another thing this belief grants us is the ability to see far, to see through the immediate reality to a more distant horizon that encompasses the whole of existence and reveals its completeness.⁸

It should be noted that contrary to the common attempts to begin spiritual work with the recognition of the divine unity of existence, the order before us teaches that it is impossible to attain this experience without the more foundational beliefs that God is above us and below us. Only after acquiring them can we achieve the abstract experience of unity.

Right: Loving God

While the first three commandments express principles of faith, the last three commandments are actions. The first of these is the commandment to love God—”And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.”⁹ The love for God is based on a feeling of gratitude and joy for the good given to us in our lives, which inspires us to reciprocate the good. According to Kabbalah, the feeling of love is represented on the right side of the body, and therefore this commandment is placed here. We should imagine the love of God as an arm being raised further and firther upward, climbing from “with all your heart” to “with all your soul” to “with all your might.”

The commandment to love God embodies all the “positive” commandments of the Torah, the commandments involving a specific action. More broadly, it expresses the totality of the good deeds we perform in the world. Placing it on our side means that at all times, we should feel a kind of itch in our arm urging us to add more goodness and abundance to the world.

Left: Fearing God

Opposite the love of God is the commandment to fear Him or have awe of Him: ”You shall fear the Lord your God.”¹⁰ This does not refer to the fear of punishment, which is a shallow and childish form of fear, but a noble fear of losing the connection with God. Just as the fear of losing a relationship can be a constructive force in preserving and maintaining it, so too in our relationship with the Holy Blessed One. The fear of God is not the opposite of His love but a complementary action that enhances the love. If at all times we carry with us the fear of growing distant from God, it acts to bring us closer to Him.

According to Kabbalah fear is placed on our left side, and there we should place it in the spiritual space we are building around us. Fear and love are likened in the Zohar to two wings with which we can ascend spiritually. Just as one cannot rise with only one wing, we need fear of God to complement our love for Him.

The commandment to fear God embodies all the “negative” commandments of the Torah, the various prohibitions that indicate things to avoid, and broadly, all the negative things to stay away from because they distance us from the connection with God.

Behind: Guarding thoughts from negative reflections

The last commandment is based on the verse “And you shall not wander after your heart and your eyes, after which you are inclined to go astray.”¹¹ The negative things we are commanded not to follow essentially express negative thoughts, mainly of low desires and personal arrogance. These feelings tend to sneak into the unconscious, which metaphorically resides in the back of our minds. Therefore, we should place this commandment there, as a kind of protection for our unconscious.¹²

The aim of the negative thoughts at the back of the mind is to magnify our sense of self-importance at the expense of our loyalty to God—to deify us in His place. Placing the commandment to guard against them behind us reminds us to constantly ‘sweep’ our thoughts from them, and it completes the spiritual cube we seek to build around us.

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A daily practice of this contemplation builds around us, as mentioned, a kind of invisible spiritual cube surrounding us at all times, with its faces being the six constant commandments. The six cities of refuge that comprise it join to form a “miniature sanctuary”¹³—a private temple enveloping us, protecting our souls from scattering, and focusing our consciousness. Through this sanctuary, we can navigate our lives while living in divine space.

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1. Sefer HaChinuch, Author's Epistle.

2. Numbers 35:10-28.

3. Exodus 20:2; Deuteronomy 5:6.

4. Pirkei Avot 2:1.

5. Exodus 20:3; Deuteronomy 5:7.

6. Deuteronomy 6:4.

7. 1 Kings 19:12.

8. Another verse that should assist us in building frontal awareness is the phrase “I have set the Lord always before me” (Psalms 16:8). Notice that the first and last letters of each of the verses “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one” (שמע ישראל הוי׳ אלהינו הוי׳ אחד) and “I have set the Lord always before me” (שויתי י־הוה לנגדי תמיד) are shin (ש) and dalet (ד), forming the word shad (שד), meaning “breast”. These two verses can regarded as the spiritual “breasts” from which we must nurse at every moment.

9. Deuteronomy 6:5, immediately following “Hear, O Israel.”

10. Deuteronomy 6:13; 10:20.

11. Numbers 15:39.

12. The verse itself hints that all the thoughts are related to the rear, as the Hebrew word for “after,” acharei, which appears three times in the verse (וְלֹא תָתוּרוּ אַחֲרֵי לְבַבְכֶם וְאַחֲרֵי עֵינֵיכֶם אֲשֶׁר אַתֶּם זֹנִים אַחֲרֵיהֶם) comes from the same root as “rear,” achor.

13. Ezekiel 11:16.