Life is never static. We ascend and descend along an almost infinite range of parameters. We also move laterally, as it were, between these parameters: relationships, career, art, physical endeavors, spiritual explorations, politics and more. We play many roles: children and parents and spouses and boy-friend/girl-friend, teammate, captain, boss, worker, lover and hater, and we often take different roles within the same relationship.

We can both learn from our relationships on the human plane to better understand our relationships with The Creator and can learn important lessons from how He relates to us to deepen, balance and improve our relationships with other people and ourselves, too (and perhaps with other entities as well).

Our relationship with God is a unique one (for many reasons), and perhaps the main distinction is that it is never one between equals. Among the fundamentals of our Torah and beliefs, God is perfect and complete within himself and, not lacking anything from His Essence, needs nothing from us. All the energy flows from Him to us, from Above, as it’s usually described, to below. Nonetheless, He recognizes our need to feel capable and independent and thus gives us a list of requirement,  mitzvot (while often (mis)translated as commandment, the root of the word refers to joining and binding) to allow us to also experience being givers and not always takers. He also places us in a complex and sophisticated framework which allows us to ever more closely resemble Him and His Ways by giving to others in order to transcend our own built-in limitations.

A powerful model described by a few of the Chassidic masters have God embedding Himself, as it were, with each of us. (The Meor Eynayim uses the imagery of food which we eat, since everything that exists is really just a manifestation of The One). Not only does the nutrition in the food literally power us, but we most intensely and directly experience the Divine core of the food in its taste and flavor. The Ta’am, taste (the word also means the reason for something) is how we detect the Netzutzei Kodesh, the Holy Sparks of Divinity which fill and permeate all existence (M’lo Kol Ha’Aretz Kvodo).

But not only does food, for example, serve to lift us up and energize us to the deeds we do, but by incorporating the sources of said food, be it animal or plant, we are sharing our holy work with them, thus also lifting them, giving the cow or fish or apple or wheat stalk a portion of deepest accomplishments, something they could never achieve on their own in their first incarnation. Thus we both are elevated and we elevate! Likewise, when we perform one of the commandments, mitzvot, we’re said to bring a “joyous spirit”, Nachat Ruach to God himself.

Likewise, with our relationships with other people, and if you think about this you can apply this principle to every kind of relationship we have, friends, business partners, teammates, lovers, too! We can summarize the goal for any healthy friendship is for both friends or partners or lovers or teammates to contribute what actions and emotions and, occasionally, material, to not merely sustain, but actually to lift the other. And in lifting, we ourselves our lifted. We understand and appreciate our own power and potential, we fulfill ourselves through giving the love we feel an actuality and not just a fuzzy emotional buzz.

Although guided at the beginning, knowing what acts we can perform which by which we, as it were, penetrate God’s Essence and “lift” Him and are lifted by Him, just as when the direction is reversed as first described.

Even with uneven relationships, take, for example, the parent/child, which begin with the parent providing and caring for the child and often develops to the child, now grown up, supporting and caring for the elder parent, we see the same pattern of interpenetrating in order to nourish and to lift. Certainly this is the ideal in what should be a more equal love relationship between two adults.

Of course, it’s much more than merely the mutual providing of “first aid” when needed, but two people. powering each other, can often go much farther together than either could alone. Just as with our relationship with God, there is no limit to the spiritual heights we can reach. And even if God doesn’t actually “receive” anything concrete from us humans, and He can’t rise higher since He already fills the entire universe from top to bottom, from east to west, He does provide us with the feedback as if we were able to coexist in actuality with The Infinite.

Further, when one has penetrated the other, the “other” can be said to function as a garment, a levush to the other, protecting as well as lending pieces of an external identity. Just as we’re commanded, Kedoshim Ti’hyu Ki Kodesh Ani, Be Holy (of course Kodesh has many more and deeper meanings than this abstract concept we call “Holy”, you get the idea) because I am Holy. We’re invited to take on God’s exclusive quality of Holiness, as a product of our penetrating Him and Him, simultaneously, covering us as a levush, all the while allowing us to retain our unique identity (since levush is a garment, not a costume). Likewise, people who work together in almost any context begin to resemble each other, all the while remaining theirselves. Long term couples often display this, as we all have experienced.

An intersting example of this is part of our current practice of counting the forty-nine days from Freedom to Enlightenment, from Pesach to Shavuot. We’re taught (through a sophisticated analysis of several verses) to count both days and weeks. This is further abstracted and adapted from periods of time to the seven personality traits represented by the seven (lower–there are actually ten sefirot completed by the “three upper ones” which usually represent the intellect rather than the emotions) sefirot. Conveniently, each of the seven weeks is comprised of seven days, so the progression of major themes of the weeks echoes in the individual days as well. In this way, we interpenetrate each of the seven with each of the seven, and observe and meditate on this cyclic motion. Ideally, each week spirals up from the previous one, just as each individual day raises the week and the levush of the week raises each day.

May we together rise and raise higher and higher, in all our relationships, including the one with ourselves, but aimed to our relationship with The One.