Out There

"Egypt" (מצרים) means "straits," alluding to psychological blocks and states of confinement. Chametz (leavened bread) symbolizes egocentricity.

Egocentricity (chametz) is the source of all psychological confinement (Egypt). No slave could escape the confining borders of Egypt. The Exodus is the miracle of breaking through the borders of Egypt by nullifying one's sense of egocentricity.

There's really something else out there. It's not all me.

Ultimately, the "something out there" (not my initial sense of me) is God, who encompasses me in His true egocentricity, so to speak. All (including my true me) exists within the "I" of God.

The first word of the Ten Commandments, the culmination of the Exodus, is "I" – "I am Havayah your God who has taken you out of the land of Egypt from the house of bondage." God's absolute "I" takes us out of psychological confinement and bondage to our exaggerated sense of ego.

In Hebrew, "something out there" (דבר בחוץ) equals 312 = 12 times 26, the value of God's essential Name, Havayah, whose 4 letters (2 of which are the same) permute in 12 different ways. Thus, All 12 permutations of Havayah (corresponding to the 12 months of the year etc.) equal "something out there."

In a previous post we saw that 312 = "He is not a body and not a power in a body" (אינו גוף ולא כח בגוף). A body is a state of confinement, a well-defined, created (finite) sense of egocentricity. A body is all "here" (in a negative sense) but not "out there."

But God is all "out there," and His "out there" encompasses everything that is "here."

In the Song of Songs, that we read on Pesach, the bride, the collective soul of Israel, says to her groom, God: "I find you out there, I kiss you" (אמצאך בחוץ אשקך).

We kiss God "out there."