Question: There are those who believe that money lending is the invention of Kabbalists in Babylon. Is this true?
Answer: I don’t think so since there were no Kabbalists in Babylon [1]. They came from the group that left Babylon and there were certainly no moneylenders in that group. Money lending was forbidden until the destruction of the Temple, which led to the general fall into egoism [2] and to the dispersion of the Jewish people all over the world and to its exile [3].
Money lending began when the Jewish people fell from the spiritual world. Money lending and the interest that was charged were based on complicated mathematical calculations by which the moneylender stole from decent people.
Today every banker can explain this complicated calculation of interest rates. If I lend someone money, he has to repay me plus a certain percentage of interest, and if he doesn’t repay me the money on time, he has to pay more. That is, there is interest charged on interest, because it takes into account the damage that I have suffered from not having received the money I had counted on, and could not recirculate.
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From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 3/27/16
Related Material:
Correct Debt Calculation [4]
Money: Past, Present, Future [5]
Why Do Jews Live Well? [6]