A question I received: Does it make a difference how a person is buried?

My Answer: First, Kabbalah engages only in the correction of the soul. When a person comes to a Kabbalistic group and begins working on himself in order to unite with the friends so as to reach the quality of a mutual guarantee, he realizes that he hates the others and is repulsed by them. This rejection of friends is, in fact, the egoistic quality that a person needs to correct by turning it into love toward them.

This is possible only with the help of the Light that influences a person while he studies Kabbalistic texts (especially those written by Baal HaSulam and RABASH). A corrected attitude to the neighbor, up to the point of loving him, is what forms a person’s soul, which becomes filled with the Light of bestowal and love: the Creator.

Second, the human body has no sanctity. This attitude to our animal body comes from religions which are based specifically on the concealment of the Creator and on the fact that people don’t feel the soul and mistakenly attribute it to the animate body. It seems to a person that there is something special or unique about the body since they don’t feel anything except the body and perceive everything only through it.

In ancient times, food, utensils, and slaves were buried along with the body of a dead master in order to help him in his future life in the same body. For that purpose, the body was embalmed. American Indians (Native Americans) still dig out the bones of the deceased from the grave, wash them, and return them to the grave as a token of respect. Hindus choose an infant for worship and make him holy. Christianity has an array of relics as well, which they argue about to this day.

Funerals are accompanied by a variety of  rituals. They all are based on ignorance and the adoration of the flesh. Muslims believe that the pleasures of our world also exist in the future world. Over the years, as Judaism descended from feeling the spiritual world and the Creator to the exile (Galut), Judaism became clothed in various external rituals. People began to honor graves and to practice fortune-telling and other “spiritual” manipulations. And although people are trying to re-build the Temple, they are doing so only in an external way according to their exiled spiritual state, and in this way it will be nothing more than an ordinary building.

Conclusion: There is no sanctity (eternity, perfection, and divinity) in our world (our thoughts, feelings, actions, objects, and rituals). Our whole world consists of three levels of nature: inanimate, vegetative, and animate. We need to reach the “human” level (from the word “Adam,” meaning Dome – similar to the Creator) through our work on correcting the mutual hatred among us into mutual love. Thereby, we will become similar to the Creator and thus feel eternity and perfection irrespective of our animate bodies.

Related Material:
Laitman.com Post: The Body Is The Correction Of Desires
Kabbalah Moments: “Without A Body”
Kabbalah Moments: “Love And Hatred”

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