A question I received: Is order important when reading The Book of Zohar? What if I’ve only joined the study recently? Should I read everything you’ve studied up to this point?

My Answer: First of all, it makes no difference which part of The Book of Zohar we are reading. It is written: “There is no time in the Torah.” So it doesn’t matter where you start reading: from the middle, end, or beginning.

It also doesn’t matter how much you understand or don’t understand, or whether you’ve joined the study just now and this is your very first lesson, or you’ve been studying a long time. You may join the study from the very beginning or be tuning in midway through the lesson, when half of the material has already been covered.

Everything we study are processes that take place in Bina, Zeir Anpin, and Malchut (AHP), where all the Upper Forces are located above Bina. That is to say, Bina is the Upper Forces’ relation toward us; Zeir Anpin is a system that conducts the forces of Bina to us along the three lines, and Malchut receives these three lines. We connect to Malchut and work on our connection to Zeir Anpin in order to connect to Bina.

The picture remains the same at all times – Bina, Zeir Anpin, and Malchut. There is nothing else. Therefore, no matter what Kabbalistic text you read, be it chapters of the Torah or parts of The Book of Zohar, the text invariably talks about the same thing – the correction of the soul in the system of AHP, ZAT de Atzilut.

This is why you will see a great deal of repetitions in The Zohar, which are all different descriptions of how the Light affects the soul. We do not know why the authors of The Zohar wrote it the way they did and why they chose those specific words and sequence of words. But they did it naturally; their writings reflect the correct actions of the Lights upon the desire as the soul ascends upward.

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