Message by Dr Gabriel Cousens.

"As this parashah falls between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, it also inspires us to examine our own dreams and goals, and pray that this coming year, as a people and as a planet, we will succeed at finding the balance in our life’s walk. Finding and maintaining the balance is a major point of spiritual life in general. The process begins with lekh lekha, “go to the self”—leave your family, leave all your concepts, leave your sectarian viewpoint, leave your nation, leave your ego, leave your ethnocentric ways of being … and wake up to the One. Sh’ma Yisrael, YHWH Eloheinu, YHWH Echad (Devarim 6:4). It also means walking every moment of your life attuned to this awareness. “When you are sitting in your home and when you are walking along the way” (Devarim 6:7). Spiritual life is not separate from your life; it is integral to the “walking along the way.” All is sacred, and all is the expression of the spiritual. Therefore “sitting in your home” is included here because that is the mundane life that we can nevertheless spiritualize by bringing our consciousness to it. It is about participating in the continual merging of the heavens and the earth. In this context, the real message of the sh’ma is that spirituality and our focus on God is absolutely an inherent part of ourselves. Merging with God is the point of life in every moment, not just when doing “spiritual practices” or mitzvot."

~ Torah As a Guide to Enlightenment (pp. 629-630)