Audio Version Of The Blog – 02.16.15
Posted on February 16th, 2015
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A woman is a symbol of the desire. The desire should be raised in the spiritual work to the level where it is purified of all its egoistic mixtures.
As it states in Zohar La’am, “Leviticus,” “Amor,” item 38: Moses said: “It is a Mitzva (commandment) that the great priest should marry a virgin.” As it says: “he should not take a widow, a divorcee, a desecrated or a prostitute, but he should take a virgin for a wife.” Why should he take only a flawless virgin? It is because a woman is a cup of blessing, “if it has been tasted it has been flawed.” This refers to Malchut that is called a cup of blessing. The great priest who sacrifices the offering before the Lord should be whole and flawless in all his parts, since the defects disqualify the priests. Whole in his body, whole in his Nukva, so that he can keep the saying: “you are completely beautiful my wife and flawless.”
Therefore the names “widow,” “divorcee,” “desecrated,” prostitute.” and “married” all mean that the desire is not yet completely pure and free of the ego. It is only after the total purification that it becomes worthy of the level on which the priest works.This level is called a virgin.To become a virgin means to ascend to the level that isn’t corrupted by the egoistic inclination.Then it can be used as the Nukva by the priest since it is free of any egoistic parts and inclusions and thus he can marry her. This means that with the help of such a desire, he can now receive the Upper Light to perform the Zivug de Haka’a and then give birth to the next level.
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From KabTV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 5/14/14
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In the News (from InoSMI): “For decades, the IQ (intelligence quotient index) among Westerners was constantly rising due to better nutrition, growth, education and health care. But after a long-term growth of IQ, it began to decline.
“This is called the Flynn effect. For example in Finland, the IQ has not grown since 1997. The decline of IQ is slow and steady. If you look at the situation 30 years ago and compare the lifestyle and health of young people, the situation is getting worse.
“Postmodernism is the era when society begins to realize that it is inconvenient to be a hero; it is easier to live as an ordinary person; everyone has the right to be in this way; everyone is right in his own way; a person has the right to choose a gender, homeland. Today’s life, not the future life, is becoming more important; there is a rejection of the bright future.
“The idea of justice is losing importance as a driving force. Brotherhood, justice, tribal relations are not central. There is I. National ideas, guidance, banners that will be followed by everyone are absent. There are different groups with their own interests and views. But the idea of a united nation is over.
“The need for cultural expression through communication on the Internet has risen. In the modern era, work brought people together, but now – the media, the Internet. There is no dominant ideology, dominant religion.”
My Comment: We have used all our egoism and reached its saturation. The new generation has nothing to aspire to; there is food, sex; everything is available, and plenty of spare time. In this environment, there is no need for an elevated IQ.
On the contrary, beginning with our time, the human being will be constantly degrading, especially with the introduction of new technologies and freeing of up to 90% of the world population from required work if we do not involve them with studying the method of integral education and upbringing—the mandatory intellectual development in similarity with nature!
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At a particular stage of development, humanity finally gets the opportunity to understand his evil egoistic, lowly nature. If we look at it closely, it seems that there is nothing good in us. We perform even the loftiest and most generous deeds with a single goal of exploiting others.
This also happens regarding our beloved children; we do everything only for our own benefit and pleasure. A person is such a great egoist that he acts solely and only in one direction, for himself. He is not capable of performing any other action. The question is, why did nature create us like this?
First of all, it is up to us to be aware of our place in the enormous mechanism of creation. We are found in it like little children who don’t understand what they are doing on this Earth, which is very small in relation to the dimensions of the infinite universe. This Earth is like our children’s room where we break everything like naughty children whose parents left them unattended.
And we suddenly remember that outside of this room there is still a big house and as it seems, the parents are the ones who created us. Nature is not a blind and wild environment because it cannot be that this world appeared by itself and by chance. It seems that there are laws in it that we must study and feel, changing somehow.
The time has come for us to stop running wild like little children, fighting among ourselves all the time. Come, let’s at least stop for a moment and cease quarreling like tenants living in the same apartment. Instead we should see things with a broader view, looking around and seeing what is happening. Maybe we will succeed in finding more meaning in our lives than we do now?
After all, we are suffering from the conflicts between us and don’t see anything good in this life. This question occupies humanity more and more and requires thought. Maybe the time has come to abandon the arrogance and hatred that are not beneficial to anyone?
This is a typical feature of our time. If previously someone thought that he could attain everything through force and dominate the entire world like Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, Alexander of Macedon, Pharaoh, or Nebuchadnezzar, in our time there are no more great dictators, neither Hitler nor Stalin.
The person of today sees that there is nothing eternal in the world and that everything is over very rapidly. So there is no reason to waste the life that is given to us only once. The person subconsciously reaches conclusions like these and enters into despair.
And yet deep at the bottom of this despair there is a wonderful pearl that can be taken; it is called the month of Elul. This is when we finally begin to understand that everything that is happening is for teaching us something. After such a discovery we already begin with a new development and don’t remain within the mutual conflicts that draw in entire nations. Instead we rise to another level of existence, a sublime level.
The month of Elul is designed for renewed, decisive thinking about our lives. We must feel our present state as intolerable and understand that there cannot be anything else with our egoistic nature. It is up to us to see ourselves in the framework of this enormous and comprehensive nature that is pure and exalted, completely perfect and infinite, and then we will be shocked by our state.
How can it be that a human being with such developed emotion and intelligence that places him above all of creation is found in the lowest, most vile and despicable state of all, harmful to himself and the rest of nature? No other creature is ever so harmful!
All the rest act not according to their intelligence, but obey instincts that are always directed towards the best possible situations. Therefore an animal doesn’t err. The smallest kitten will not fall from a height because it protects itself instinctively, whereas a small child can fall because he doesn’t feel danger.
What results from this is that along with our developed emotion and intelligence we also get freedom of choice and the possibility of using our highest potential to develop correctly or incorrectly. This is the entire problem.
Inanimate nature, plants, and animals do not have the freedom of choice that makes it possible to use emotions and intelligence differently. With them everything is simply directed towards the most self-benefit, here and now. With humans there is nothing like this.
And therefore the human, unlike a cat or dog, can harm himself. Essentially this is what happens. We possess greater intelligence than the rest of the creatures, and yet we use it to our detriment and cannot even understand this. It seems that we want to utilize this intelligence for our own good and the detriment of others. Yet ultimately it follows that we are digging a pit for ourselves.
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From KabTV’s “A New Life” 9/14/14
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Foreword: The Specter and the Spirit
How I Came to Write this Book
I was born in August, 1946 in the city of Vitebsk, Belarus. It was the second summer after the end of World War Two, and life was sluggish, slowly hobbling back toward the affable monotony of normalcy. Being the firstborn child of a dentist father and a gynecologist mother, I had a rather carefree childhood, conveniently growing up in a suburban neighborhood, untroubled by the material concerns that preoccupied most of my childhood friends.
And yet, a shadow followed me throughout my childhood and even through my teens. It was the specter of the Holocaust, that phantom many chose never to mention, though it was always there. Names of family members or of friends who perished were mentioned in a somber tone, giving them an uncanny presence, as though they were still with us, although I knew they weren’t.
And odder still was the revulsion of my Russian peers toward Jews. Children I grew up with hated Jews simply because they were Jews. They knew what had happened to their Jewish neighbors just over a year ago, but they were as sardonic and unsympathetic as before the war, so I was told by my elders. This, I could not understand. Why were they so hateful? What unforgivable wrong had Jews ever done to them? And where did they learn those horror stories about the things that Jews might do to them?
As would be expected from the son of parents in the medical professions, I, too, took up a medical profession as my career “of choice.” I studied medical bio-cybernetics, a science that explores the systems of the human body, and I became a scientist, a researcher at the St. Petersburg Blood Research Institute. And while fantasizing myself beaming with pride on the pulpit in Stockholm, Sweden, the winner of a Nobel Prize, a deeper passion I have been harboring has been edging toward the surface of my consciousness.
“I want to understand the system,” I began to think, “to know how everything works.” But most of all, I began to ponder why everything was the way it was.
As a scientist at heart, I began to search for scientific answers that could explain everything, not just how to calculate the mass of an object or the acceleration of its fall, but what caused that object to exist in the first place.
And since I could not find an answer in science, I decided to move on. After being a refusenik (Soviet Jews who were denied permission to emigrate abroad) for two years, I finally got my permit and left for Israel in 1974.
In Israel, I kept searching for the meaning and the reason behind everything. Two years after I arrived in Israel, I began to study Kabbalah. But it was not until February, 1979 that I found my teacher, the Rabash, the firstborn son and successor of Rav Yehuda Leib HaLevi Ashlag, known as Baal HaSulam (Owner of the Ladder) for his Sulam (Ladder) commentary on The Book of Zohar.
Finally, my prayers were answered! Each day, each hour, new revelations dawned on me. The pieces of the puzzle of reality fell into place one at a time, and a coherent picture of the world began to form before me, as though the mist itself was taking shape before my awestruck eyes.
My life had been transformed, and I immersed myself in my studies and in assisting the Rabash in any way I could. I was fortunate enough to be able to support my family with just a few hours of work each day, and I dedicated the rest of my time to absorbing the wisdom as much and as deeply as I could.
To me, I was living a dream reality. I had a wonderful family, I lived in a country where I really felt free; I made a good living with ease, and I had found the answers to my lifelong questions.
One of those persistent questions was the one about the hatred of the Jews. In Kabbalah, I discovered why it happens, why it is persisting, and most important, what must be done to heal it. Indeed, anti-Semitism is a sore in the heart of humanity, an echo of an unhealed pain that the world has been carrying for almost 4,000 years, since Abraham, our Patriarch, left Babylon.
Kabbalah has taught me that Abraham had proposed to his people to unite and be once more of “one language and of one speech” (Genesis 11:1), and that King Nimrod, Babylon’s ruler at the time, had prevented Abraham from circulating his idea. Gradually, I came to see that what the world now needs is that same unity, that camaraderie and mutual guarantee that Abraham had developed with his group and progeny, and that King Nimrod had stopped him from endowing to his Babylonian brothers and sisters.
One morning lesson, my teacher, the Rabash, taught me Baal HaSulam’s “Introduction to the Book of Zohar.” At the end of it, Baal HaSulam wrote that unless the Jews endowed the world with the knowledge and the guidance toward unity, the nations of the world would loathe the Jews, humiliate them, drive them out from the land of Israel, and torment them wherever they may be. I had read that unfathomable essay before, but that morning it had a deeper impact on me. I felt another stage in my development emerging from within.
Later that day, we went to Kfar Saba, a small town near Tel Aviv, to a Kolel (Jewish seminary) named after my esteemed mentor. In the basement, the Rabash showed me a medium-size cardboard box filled to the brim with handwritten pieces of paper. He asked if I could take it to the car and bring it back to his house.
I put the box in the trunk, and on the way back I asked him what those papers were in the box. Unceremoniously, he muttered, “Some old manuscripts of Baal HaSulam.” I looked at him, but he looked straight at the road ahead and kept silent all the way back.
That night, the lights were on in Baruch Ashlag’s kitchen all night long. I stayed there and meticulously read through every piece of paper until I found one that would let me search no more. It was the piece of the puzzle I was looking for without even knowing it. It was the capstone, the first step in the march I was to take henceforth.
The paper I had found, which is now part of Baal HaSulam’s “The Writings of the Last Generation,” told a tale of agony and thirst, love and friendship, deliverance and commitment. Here are the words that I found: “There is an allegory about friends who were lost in the desert, hungry and thirsty. One of them had found a settlement filled abundantly with every delight. He remembered his poor brothers, but he had already drawn far off from them and did not know their place. …He began to shout out loud and blow the horn; perhaps his poor, hungry friends would hear his voice, approach and come to that abundant settlement filled with every delight.
“So is the matter before us: we have been lost in the terrible desert along with all of humanity, and now we have found a great, abundant treasure, namely the books of Kabbalah. They fulfill our yearning souls and fill us abundantly with lushness and agreement.
“We are satiated and there is more, but the memory of our friends left hopelessly in the terrible desert remains deep within our hearts. The distance is great, and words cannot bridge between us. For this reason, we have set up this horn to blow loudly so that our brothers may hear and draw near and be as happy as we.
“Know, our brothers, our flesh, that the essence of the wisdom of Kabbalah consists of the knowledge of how the world came down from its elevated, heavenly place, to our ignoble state. …It is therefore very easy to find in the wisdom of Kabbalah all the future corrections destined to come from the perfect worlds that preceded us. Through it we will know how to correct our ways henceforth.
“…Imagine, for example, that some historic book were to be found today, which depicts the last generations ten thousand years from now, describing the comportment of both individuals and society. Our leaders would seek out every counsel to arrange life here accordingly, and we would come to ‘no outcry in our broad places.’ Corruption and the terrible suffering would cease, and everything would come peacefully to its place.
“Now, distinguished readers, this book lies here before you in a closet. It states explicitly the entire wisdom of statesmanship and the conducts of private and public life that will exist at the end of days. It is the books of Kabbalah, where the corrected worlds are set. …Open these books and you will find all the good comportments that will appear at the end of days, and you will find within them the good lessons by which to arrange mundane matters today as well.
“…I can no longer restrain myself. I have resolved to disclose the conducts of correction of our definite future that I have found by observation and by reading in these books. I have decided to go out to the people of the world with this horn, and I believe and estimate that it shall suffice to gather all those deserving to begin to study and delve in the books. Thus they will sentence themselves and the entire world to a scale of merit.”[i]
About a year after finding these papers, I published my first three books with my teacher’s guidance and support. I have been publishing books ever since, and I have circulated Kabbalah by numerous other means, as well.
Today’s reality is very harsh, and people often have no patience or desire to delve into books, as Baal HaSulam imagined. But the essence of the wisdom, the love, and the unity that are the foundations of reality, and which Kabbalah instills in its practitioners, remain as true as they have always been.
Moreover, since around the turn of the century, anti-Semitism has been on the rise once more, this time the world over. The specter of the hatred of the Jews has taken root worldwide. Spreading stealthily and venomously, it is threatening to infest entire nations with Judeophobia, and to repeat the horrors of the past.
But now we know the cure. Whenever Jews unite, the serpent hides its head. The spirit of camaraderie and mutual responsibility has always been our “weapon,” our shield against adversity. Now we should muster that spirit, cloak ourselves with it, and let its healing warmth surround us. And once we have done so, we must share that spirit with the rest of the world, as this is our vocation—the essence of our being “a light for the nations.”
And so, because we all need answers to our deepest questions, because deep inside all Jews want to know the cure for anti-Semitism, and because it is the legacy of my teacher and my teacher’s great teacher and father, I have decided to detail what I have learned from them. They taught me what it means to be a Jew, what it means to be committed, and what it means to share. But most of all, they taught me what it means to love like the Creator.
[i] Rav Yehuda Leib HaLevi Ashlag (Baal HaSulam), The Writings of Baal HaSulam, “The Writings of the Last Generation” (Ashlag Research Institute: Israel, 2009), 813-814.
Writings of Rabash, “Steps of the Ladder,” Article 12
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The Book of Zohar, Selected Excerpts — “Israel and the Nations,” Item 18
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Talmud Eser Sefirot, Vol. 6, Part 16, “Table of Answers for the Meaning of the Words,” Item 36
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Writings of Baal HaSulam, “Peace in the World,” “In the Absence of the Ability to Establish the Attribute of Truth, They Tried to Establish the Noble”
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