Hope For Salvation
Question: Why is it so difficult to keep the intention while reading The Book of Zohar, or to imagine the connection between us and to grab on to the text? What should we do?
Answer: If a person found himself in a great disaster and was told, “Read this text for half an hour and there you will reveal how to get out of the disaster,” then you can imagine how he would spend that half hour. Would it be difficult for him to concentrate on it? What kind of pressure and hope would he feel in trying to penetrate inside the text, to understand what is being required of him, what he can find there, what kind of salvation is there, and how it will arrive….
Everything depends on the environment, on how much it “warms up” this inner attitude to The Zohar’s text. All other Kabbalistic texts are beneficial to a smaller extent with regard to their text’s influence on the reader because when reading them we can involve the mind and feelings, and somehow connect them to ourselves.
The Torah, in turn, is perfect, pure, unattainable, “in the heavens.” What does “pure” (Tmima) mean? No one touches it. It is the upper Light. We only wait for the results from it that will manifest in us.
Only the group can give me this attitude to reading The Zohar so I would passionately wish to receive a result from it. Otherwise it won’t happen.
We have already gone through this state when we just began reading The Zohar. During the first few months people were so inspired that this common excitement influenced every person and every person felt the surrounding illumination to some extent, feeling the power of The Zohar’s influence upon him.
Now this inspiration has waned because at first we received it from above, whereas now we have to develop it ourselves. Nothing happens by itself in nature. You receive an initial awakening and then it is taken away so you would add it from your own end, so you would complete the space that has been emptied of inspiration from above with your own efforts.
If we don’t add to it ourselves, then we cannot keep the intention for correction over the course of 45 minutes while reading The Zohar, and we just wait for the lesson to be over. If we don’t awaken a person, if we don’t stimulate the inner vibrations in him so he would feel like a sick person facing the only means of salvation, the only opportunity to be healed and saved from disaster, then of course it is difficult for him to keep the intention and to grab on to the text. In essence, he blames us because we do not let him feel the vital necessity of this, meaning the importance of the goal.
From the 2nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/17/11, The Zohar
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When talking about bestowal and reception within corporeality, many people use words such as ‘give’ or ‘receive’, such as this person gives money to that person or this person receives food from that person. There is a literal object that is discussed about – IE food or money. What is the literal object that kabbalists talk about? Is there a literal object?