Question: How does the wisdom of Kabbalah relate to the concept of love?

Answer: According to the wisdom of Kabbalah there are two types of love: love of friends and love of the Creator. All the other types of love belong to the physiological level and so from a Kabbalistic perspective it is considered affection, mutual satisfaction, and a person’s obligation to his family and children, but not love.

Love refers to what is above our egoistic level and is revealed to a person when he attains spirituality. By restricting the use of his ego and ascending above it, a person exits himself, enters into the group and those around him, where he discovers love.

The fulfillment of love is expressed by caring about those around you. What is more, these are people who are strangers to me, not part of my family, not my relatives, and I am not interested in them at all.

But the moment I begin to discover them as an essential component necessary for my spiritual ascent, I realize that I must care for them and love them, since by the correct connection with them, I attain the Creator. Then from the love of those around me, I reach the love of the Creator.

Today love is nothing more than natural physiological actions that are also instinctively found in animals. In humans, however, love isn’t an instinct and it has turned into almost anything you can imagine.

In other words, we can regard it as a sport, exercise, or pleasure, but it isn’t the love the wisdom of Kabbalah refers to. It has nothing to do with the self-sacrifice for a sublime idea, like in the spiritual feeling called love.

According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, love is incorporating the desires of those who are strangers to me inside me and caring about filling those desires more than my own desires. This becomes the goal of my life. I am ready to dedicate my whole life in order to fill the desires of others since this is what the Creator expects of me.

Question: Can such relations in a family also be called love?

Answer: Only if I transcend above the corporeal unity with my family and regard them as total strangers. If not, my relationship with them is on an ordinary physiological level.

Thus, there should be a strict understanding and division between the spiritual concept of love and the corporeal one. On the corporeal level the question: “Do you love me?” means “Are you ready to satisfy my personal desires?” It is an ordinary display of the ego. Therefore today we are witnessing an increase in the incidence of divorce and breakups of the family. But this trend is a sign of a reassessment of this generation’s values.
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From KabTV’s “Short Stories” 10/23/14

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