New Life 779 – Studying The Torah Today
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and Tal Mandelbaum ben Moshe
The Torah is not a book or an encyclopedia, but an upper force that exists in nature called the Light.
The first to discover the upper force 5,777 years ago was called Adam and then Abraham discovered it after him.
Abraham taught his group how to draw the Upper Light, called the Torah [1], in order to connect people through love. This is how the nation of Israel was founded. Later a new egoistic desire was revealed among the nation of Israel and this process is referred to as going down to Egypt.
The exodus from Egypt describes how we ascend above the egoism that divides us. Then there is a series of instructions of how we should correct ourselves, according to which we have to connect as one man in one heart, in mutual guarantee.
We have 613 egoistic desires and the force of the Torah corrects each of them. Throughout history there were times in which the people used the Torah correctly and times when they didn’t.
After the destruction of the second Temple, only Rashbi’s group of ten people was left, and they passed The Book of Zohar [2], the Light for the future, to us. Today The Book of Zohar was revealed thanks to the Sulam Commentary, which is meant to help us draw the Light in the Torah.
The Ari discovered the wisdom of Kabbalah [3] back in the 16th century in Safed and Baal Shem Tov was the next to discover it. Every generation is given the writings that are suitable for it, and in our generations it is the writings of Baal HaSulam and Rabash.
The Torah has been studied in exile since the destruction of the Temple, which means studying what is written in the book without correcting the heart. Today we have to return to the original attitude to the Torah as a means for the correction of the heart and the connection between us.
Why do we need the Torah today? Because the world is in a general crisis and the ego is the cause of the collapse of systems.
The saying “and you shall repeat to your sons” means that for thousands of years the Torah has kept us as the level of “the still nature of Holiness.” Today it is our duty to add the internality of the Torah since without it the externality will not be preserved either.
Studying the wisdom of Kabbalah is studying in a group in order to connect.
The Jews are different from all the other nations of the world since it is their duty to connect and to set an example of love to all of humanity. They are the spearhead on the way to correcting the world and therefore it says: “My home will be called a home of prayer for all the nations.”
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From KabTV’s “New Life 779 – Studying The Torah Today,” 10/18/16
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