Chasidut teaches us to construct a spiritual cube around our consciousness, protecting and directing us.
Constant Commandments
Among the 613 commandments of the Torah, there are six special commandments that are deemed constant or perpetual commandments, meaning that they must be observed at every moment.
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 “Duties of the Heart.”
The six constant Duties of the Heart are:
- To believe in the existence and Providence of God.
- Not to believe in other gods besides Him.
- To believe that God is one, with a consummate and indivisible unity.
- To love God.
- To fear God.
- To guard one’s thoughts from negative reflections.
One of the places where these commandments are listed is Sefer HaChinuch, which is one of the earliest enumerations of all 613 commandments. When Sefer HaChinuch lists these commandments, 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.
Anyone who kills by mistake must flee to them; so long as he is within the city of refuge, 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 Torah’s inner dimension identifies the significance of murder with a conscious effacement of the image of God—both in the individual murdered and in 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 the places or rather the states of mind where this disconnect from Godliness 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 a city of refuge, these commandments are meant to protect us from forgetting that we are God’s creations. Cherishing these commandments in our heart 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.
Cities of Refuge
Let us now try to translate the concept of the six constant commandments as cities of refuge into a meditative contemplation.
One way of illustrating this is by creating a visual image. Comparing the commandments of the heart to a mental refuge we build around us means correlating the six constant 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 Havayah your God,” which is understood as the commandment to believe in God. Although God one should consider God to be omnipresent, intuitively, we think of Him as being above us, as in the phrases “Our Father in Heaven” and “Know what is above you.” We naturally think of God as “watching from above.” Similarly, before we learn that the Earth is round and that the sky (i.e., the atmosphere) surrounds all of it, we tend to think of the ground as being underneath us and the sky as being above us.
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 extends the first, as it is the second of the Ten Commandments: “You shall have no other gods before Me.” 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 other forces at the same time, hence the need for two separate commandments. We tend 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 the 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 Havayah is our God, Havayah is one.” 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 something else—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,” 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.
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 experience of the unity of everything.
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 Havayah your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.” 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 can imagine in our mind’s eye, how our right arm, signifying our love for God, rises higher and higher as we climb from loving him “with all [y]our heart” to “with all [y]our soul” to “with all [y]our might.”
The commandment to love God includes in it all the positive or prescriptive commandments of the Torah, the commandments involving the performance of a specific action. More broadly, it expresses the totality of the good deeds we perform in the world. Placing it at our side encourages us to always 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 Havayah your God.” This does not refer to the fear of punishment, which is a shallow and childish form of fear, but a noble fear of losing our 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 fly with only one wing, we need fear of God to complement our love for Him.
The commandment to fear God includes all the negative or prohibitive 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 our connection with God.
Behind: Guarding thoughts from negative reflections
The last constant 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.” 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.
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.
A daily practice of this contemplation builds around us, as mentioned, a kind of invisible spiritual cube that continues to surround us at all times, whose six faces are the six constant commandments. These six cities of refuge that comprise this spiritual cube join to form a “miniature sanctuary”—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.
