A question I received: If there is none else but the Creator, then who ruined the common soul that was perfect in the beginning, making it need correction? In your book Attaining the Worlds Beyond, you wrote about the Creator’s “mistake.” If this is the answer to my question – that the Creator made a mistake, then why did you put the word “mistake” in quotation marks?

My Answer: We make our children learn by building things out of Lego pieces, solving problems, putting together puzzles – or in other words, by creating. This makes them grow up to be mature, intelligent people.

The Creator created a perfect universe. However, in order to give us the opportunity to grow to His level, He destroyed the initial creation completely, and it fell to the lowest state – our world. He did this to give us the opportunity to create that perfect creation. All the means for doing this are inside us, and Kabbalah tells us how to do it.

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We’ve just aired a new blog in Spanish called “Cabalá y el Significado de la Vida“ (Kabbalah and the Meaning of Life):

There are many groups and individuals in Latin America studying Kabbalah with us. I hope that the blog will become a source of simple, popular knowledge and information on Kabbalah for many new friends!

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A question I received: Rather than the “punishment” related articles, I would like to read more about how a student of Kabbalah should not be drawn into being a little more isolated than the norm. Surely some hermit-like behavior is inevitable when one is in a “virtual group,” physically isolated from Kli participants and not particularly interested in spending too much time in idle chit chat.

My Answer: You are right – one studying Kabbalah cannot help but grow detached from the world. On the other hand, every day I spend some time watching news or movies about nature and current events. Every day I go to the sea, where I speed walk for five kilometers and then swim. I spend the rest of my time sitting in one place, indoors – and I’ve been following this routine for many years already.

So don’t worry about feeling isolated from the world. This is how one feels in the beginning – as if one is leaving this entire world. This happens because you are being filled by spiritual information, but later on you will also find room for this world.

Time will balance everything out. Don’t worry about this, and don’t make any artificial actions. I recommend not wasting your time on communication with empty people. Whenever you can, absorb the maximum possible knowledge and impressions from the Kabbalistic sources. Find a sensible way to distribute work, sports, family, and Kabbalah – and soon you will feel the result!

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A question I received: I am a 31 year old woman, married with five children. Recently my marriage went through a difficult crisis. My husband cheated on me with my best friend (a divorcee) and then left me for her. Their relationship continued for four months, and it was very difficult for me to live through that period. Now my husband and I are living together again and trying to rekindle our relationship. He says he needs to share with me what he went through during that period, but I’m afraid that I just won’t be able to bear the pain of it all over again. I think that I have to erase everything that happened from my memory in order to go on with my life. What do you think?

My Answer: You are right. Don’t think about the past, but only about the present and the future. Think of your husband as if you’ve just met, and erase everything that happened. This is what Kabbalah advises us to do, and it’s the same with our relationship with the Creator. This action is called “Dilug” – skipping over.

One should think that events happening now are happening through one’s active participation and that they are actions that he can and must change. However, as soon as part of an action or the entire action has happened, one should immediately accept it as something that happened according to the Creator’s initial plan.

In other words, do not regret anything, but also do not be proud of what you did or think that it happened because of you, that you participated in it. Rather, accept it as something that nature gave to you and that passed over you in order to teach you about the following action – which depends entirely on you. Your attitude to the future should be ordinary, materialistic – without relying on the Creator. We learn in Kabbalah that everything depends on raising a MAN – a request for correction.

It is difficult to relate everything that happened in the past to the Creator. Yet it is necessary, because otherwise you can’t be constantly unified with the Creator. The union with the Creator lies in always perceiving Him, while attributing all of the past to Him, and all of the future – to yourself.

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Questions I received about the relationship between the body, the mind and spirituality:

Question: What’s the right attitude to have to your body? The body is the most perfect machine in the world. Every cell in it works like a perfect system, maybe even like the entire cosmos. This is why it’s difficult for me to think of it as just an “animal.”

My Answer: You should think of your body as a valuable animal that’s meant for doing work. You have to take care of it (but not pamper it!) – wash it, feed it, and so on – and demand for it to work.

Question: Should a person solve all or most of his psychological problems before turning to Kabbalah?

My Answer: If a person is mentally sane, then Kabbalah will solve his psychological problems. But if he is mentally ill (his brain does not function properly), then he cannot study Kabbalah. In this case I would advise doing more things to relax the mind, as well as more sports and physical work.

Question: You say that there is no connection between spirituality and corporeality. Then how can a corrected intention affect the health of one’s physical body?

My Answer: It’s because everything in our world is a consequence of the Upper Light’s (Ohr Makif’s) influence. Man is a part of the integral system of Adam, the single soul. Therefore, even if he is righteous, he can get sick and suffer, because he is contained within a single organism with others who are not yet corrected.

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Questions I received on whether one should visit the graves of the righteous, and what to ask for at these sites:

Question: I want to visit the graves of the righteous on Mount Miron. The trip I’m interested in going on will be held at night, and the trip’s organizer said that according to Kabbalah, you can use the moon’s cycle to calculate what is the best time to ask to be cured from illness. However, I also heard another opinion from someone who studies Kabbalah – he said that this shouldn’t be done. I would like to find out whether it can be done, and why at night?

My Answer: No one ever visits graves at night. The one exception is the night of Lag BaOmer, when people light bonfires all over Israel, including Mount Miron, by the grave of Rashbi, the author of The Book of Zohar. This is an ancient custom. However, asking to be cured from illness when there is a full moon has nothing to do with Kabbalah, but only with mysticism and shamanism.

Rabash and I used to go to Tiberius for two days out of the week, and sometimes we visited the grave of Rashbi on Mount Miron. Rabash respected that place. However, he didn’t see it as a place to ask for people’s corporeal, egoistic problems to be solved, such as healing, but rather only as a place to ask for similarity to the Creator. When one is there, he should ask for the ability to love his neighbor, instead of being concerned with one’s animate body, with healing it, or other benefits.

By definition, Kabbalah is the method of revealing the Creator (the property of love and bestowal) to a person in this world (in this life). Kabbalah bears no relation to receiving something for oneself. (See the definition in the article “The Essence of the Wisdom of Kabbalah.”)

Between the years 1979 and 1991, when I knew Rabash, he visited the Wailing Wall only once – in 1983. He just walked past the wall, at least 2-3 meters away from it, and didn’t even come close to it, not to mention touching it. He visited the grave of the Ari once in ten years.

Baal HaSulam once said that he really doesn’t care where they’ll bury the bag with his bones. When he passed away and his students didn’t know where to bury him, one student remembered that Baal HaSulam used to like walking on a specific hill, and that’s where they buried him.

Once I asked Rabash for permission to fix up Baal HaSulam’s grave – to whiten it, make a place for candles, and so on. Rabash told me to leave this to others, because there were more important things to do.  Rabash also didn’t prepare a burial place for himself, even though it’s a custom among the religious. (In the past bodies weren’t buried, but locked in a cave that was dug for this purpose. They were left there for some time, and when only the bones remained, they were placed into a vessel.)

Kabbalists do not respect anything corporeal. Every person respects what is important to him, and what he is attached to – the body or the soul. To a Kabbalist, the body is intended to do work, just like an animal (for example, cattle). All his attention is focused on developing the soul – the part of the Creator in man, the property of love and bestowal.

Question: Rashbi is buried on Mount Miron, and thousands of people visit his grave every year. Is this something the Creator instructed them to do, or do these instructions come from religious leaders who want to influence people and have power over them?

My Answer: Kabbalah favors this custom, because it brings people closer to Kabbalah, making them respect it and become interested in it.

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A news report that appeared in The Economist: “A battle of ideas is going on inside your mind.” That problem solving becomes easier when more minds are put to the task is no more than common sense. But the phenomenon goes further than that. Ask two people to answer a question like “how many windows are there on a London double-decker bus” and average their answers. Their combined guesses will usually be more accurate than if just one person had been asked. Ask a crowd, rather than a pair, and the average is often very close to the truth. The phenomenon was called “the wisdom of crowds” by James Surowiecki, a columnist for the New Yorker who wrote a book about it.

Now a pair of psychologists have found an intriguing corollary. They have discovered that two guesses made by the same person at different times are also better than one.That is strange. Until now, psychologists have assumed that when people make a guess, they make the most accurate guess that they can. Ask them to make a second guess and it should, by definition, be less accurate. If that were true, averaging the first and second guesses should decrease the accuracy. Yet Edward Vul at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harold Pashler at the University of California, San Diego, have revealed in a study just published in Psychological Science that the average of first and second guesses is indeed better than either guess on its own.

The two researchers asked 428 people eight questions drawn from the “CIA World Factbook”: for example, “What percentage of the world’s airports are in the USA?” Half the participants were unexpectedly asked to make a second, different guess immediately after they completed the initial questionnaire. The other half were asked to make a second guess three weeks later.

Dr Vul and Dr Pashler found that in both circumstances the average of the two guesses was better than either guess on its own. They also noticed that the interval between the first and second guesses determined how accurate that average was. Second guesses made immediately improved accuracy by an average of 6.5%; those made after three weeks improved the accuracy by 16%.

Even after three weeks, the result is still only one-third as good as the wisdom of several different people. But that this happens at all raises questions about “individuality” within an individual. If guesses can shift almost at random, where are they coming from?

My Comment: Everything comes from the common informational field – the common soul. We are all connected in one system, and it makes no difference whether we realize it or not. For the time being, we are in an unconscious state in relation to this system – a state Kabbalah calls “sleeping.”

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Here is a song called “We Have a Game” performed by the Bnei Baruch Band (the English translation of the lyrics appears below):

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLkZnjgTyWE]

We have a game where there are no losers,
The Creator is great and we are His children.
In our game we hold each other by the hand,
He is you and you are me,
Together we are one body.

In this game we will grow and mature,
We will feel the Upper World and begin to unite.
Only in one body will we find the answer,
And discover everything out of love.

We have a bond from here to Infinity (Ein Sof),
We move from the darkness, from darkness to Light.
Together we will grow and reach the top,
Big and small, white and black.

We have a game where there are no losers,
The Creator is great and we are His children.
In this game we will grow and mature,
We will feel the Upper World and begin to unite.

We have a bond from here to Ein Sof,
We move from the darkness, from darkness to Light.
Together we will grow and reach the top,
Big and small, white and black.

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Kabbalah Music

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A question I received: It says in the book Shamati, Article #16: “The rooster said to the bat: ‘I await the light for the light is mine; but you, what need have you for light?’” My question is: How does a person go from the state of being a bat to the state of being a rooster in this lifetime?

My Answer: Those who use Kabbalah (Torah) to attain the property of love and bestowal will see the Light of life in this property. On the other hand, those who use Kabbalah (Torah) for their own sake (to get rich, satisfy their pride, attain honor and confidence, to feel like they’re better than others, to justify their existence, and so on) are in the state of darkness; yet they are convinced that they are in the Light of the Creator. They are like bats that mistake the darkness for the light, and hence they are content to remain in exile from spirituality, to perform mere physical rituals – and they don’t feel like they need anything more.

Look at what Baal Hasulam writes in the “Introduction to Talmud Eser Sefirot,” about the words of the prophet Amos, “Woe unto you that desire the day of the Lord! Wherefore would ye have the day of the Lord? It is darkness, and not light!” “There is a parable about a rooster and a bat that were awaiting the light. The rooster said to the bat: ‘I await the light for the light is mine; but you, what need have you for light?’ (The Talmud. Sanhedrin 98:2)” This means that without the Light (which descends only when one studies Kabbalah), one doesn’t even understand that he is in darkness, because he only perceives our world.

If a person doesn’t aspire higher, above our world, but is satisfied with mechanical observance of rituals, historical and philosophical investigations, theology, holy water, amulets, and meditation (as we can see, this covers the whole gamut, from the naïve to the erudite), in other words, if one doesn’t have a “point in the heart,” then nothing will help him. It’s because his desire is still on the level of our world, and people always act exclusively according to the desires that surface in them.

Hence, Kabbalah is intended only for those who are searching for a genuine answer to the question, “What is the meaning of life?” And this answer lies in attaining the Source of one’s existence. This is how one reveals the meaning of what is happening as well as its final outcome.

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Two questions I received on overcoming our fears:

Question: In one of your lessons on the book Shamati you spoke about fear, and you said that when a person is afraid, he should immediately connect to the Creator. Can you elaborate on this? What should I do when I feel chilled to the bone with worry about my loved ones?

My Answer: You should connect everything that is happening with the Creator, with yourself, and with the entire world, so that all of these will unite into one and there won’t be any difference between them. All of your doubts and fears should vanish within this union. And if they don’t – then it’s even better! Then you can ask the Creator to help you.

Actually, if you open The Book of Zohar , you’ll discover that the first correction, “Pkuda Kadma” (in Aramaic) is when one attains true fear. In fact, fear always haunts everyone and everything: On the still level of nature, there is fear to preserve its structure, on the vegetative and animate levels of nature, there is fear to become filled with what’s necessary and to push away what’s harmful. And it’s the same with man.

Question: Can studying Kabbalah help one get rid of his fears, for example, the fear of being on stage or of expressing one’s opinion?

My Answer: Yes, because studying Kabbalah develops your perception of the unity of everything, of the integral universe. It also replaces one’s earthly fears with the true fear – the need to attain the Creator.

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