Where Is The Zohar Inside Me?

law5 A question I received: Should I try to understand the meaning of every word while reading The Book of Zohar?

My Answer: We should swim along with the current with the story. We are reading about what is happening inside our soul similar to how we’d read a book about the physiology of a human body. It tells about the body’s metabolism, the different organs, how they influence each other, what kind of electrical and chemical reactions and processes are going on, and so on.

Well, a spiritual organism is an exact copy of a physical one. The difference is that with our physical body, we are unaware of all the thousands of systems inside it, whereas when studying our soul, they are revealed to us. Thus, the main thing while reading The Book of Zohar is the internal search – where is it inside me?

The Soul On The Computer Screen

clip_image001A question I received: How can I strengthen my connection to the group if I only see them on the computer screen?

My Answer: This weekend there will be a global Kabbalah congress, hosted simultaneously in dozens of places around the world. Some places will host gatherings of hundreds of people, and other places – dozens. All together there will be thousands of people all over globe in attendance, all of whom desire to feel as one!

We must understand that we can only unite by connecting our points in the heart. Let’s participate together in all the lessons, meals, seminars, concerts, and in everything. But the most important thing is our thoughts.

I must remember that I am together with thousands of people all over the world who share the same desire with me. Thought and desire are not limited by physical distance. They are forces that spread with infinite speed and are unstoppable. The force of thought and desire is more powerful than anything in the universe.

Therefore, if we try to unite together, we will definitely evoke changes within us, and I very much hope for that to happen. Today our world group is strong enough to help everybody make the jump over the “wall” and cross into the spiritual world. If we try to do it together, then we have every opportunity we need to make it happen. It all depends on our willingness to connect and the understanding that one person is incapable of establishing this connection alone.

Our state is identical to the one at Mount Sinai. We are given a condition: Unite as one man with one heart. But everybody understands that this is impossible! We are standing around Mount Sinai (Sina means “hatred” in Hebrew). A mountain of hatred separates us from one another; it separates all of us. But we have points in the heart, which are gathered at the base of this mountain and unable to do anything.

That is why we demand for the Creator to be revealed in order to give us the Torah – the Light. If I were capable of connecting to others on my own, I would have no need for the Creator. He created the evil inclination, which is the evil I reveal while standing at the base of this mountain. We find that we are unable to unite together despite our great desire and understanding that there is no other way to go, that this is our only salvation.

It follows that we demand the Torah as a means of correction. But this is only made possible by the Upper Force, which unites us into one common spiritual vessel by assembling together all of its disconnected parts.

And then the Creator is revealed to the creature; this is called “the giving of the Torah,” where the Creator acts as a witness or a guarantor to our mutual guarantee. It is precisely He who upholds this mutual guarantee; He is the collective force of bestowal that unites us together.

From that moment on we continue to build our common spiritual vessel (Kli) by ourselves, having set off on a forty-year-long journey into the desert…

A Lesson On The Physiology Of The Soul

laws We have to submerge deep inside ourselves and try to feel the processes described in The Zohar from the very depth of our souls. I don’t know where all these desires and properties are inside me; I just want to sense what The Book of Zohar tells me about the processes that take place within me at this time.

It doesn’t matter that I don’t understand what kind of processes they are, or that everything happens on spiritual degrees which are concealed from me. I want to uncover them, because they are all happening within me, here and now. I want to feel where these qualities are located, where these processes are happening, and how all these parts work within me.

A Great Desire Determines Our Life

clip_image001Our entire nature is made of a desire to enjoy, and this desire will forever remain with us. However, the desire itself contains many contrasting parts which are different and disconnected from each other.

It is similar to how impossible it would be to compare certain functions of the human body such as the liver to the heart, or the brain to the kidneys, since each one has its own cells, distinct from the other. In fact, if we were to transplant part of one organ to another, it would poison and kill that organ; that is how different and alien they are to each other. But their common work together in harmony, for the same goal, unites them into a whole body.

That is why it is not unlike that which we read about in the spiritual systems within the soul’s body. The functions or qualities of Job, Pharaoh, Israel, Abraham, and so on, seem contradictory to us. However we must not destroy even a single quality. We only need to assemble them correctly so that they are ultimately included in one intention of love and bestowal, which is for the sake of the Creator.

Moreover, there is room for each and every desire, even the “negative” desires like Pharaoh, Job, Bilam, Balak, and even Amalek (the biggest desire for self reception). There is not a single desire that doesn’t connect to this one intention of bestowal. Our desires will remain different, but in the end, these differences will not be felt. Indeed, all parts of the system will work in harmony, interconnected and joined together with the aim of becoming like the Creator.

To become like the Creator means to replicate the system which is shown to us as an example through The Book of Zohar. It is similar to how we teach a child by example, such as how to behave in this world, while the child tries to emulate it. Likewise, we need to develop our desire to understand how to unite all of our desires, thoughts, and intentions into the system we read about in The Book of Zohar.

Right now very little of that system is understood to us, just as a baby barely understands his mother yet strives to know. While it is extremely difficult for the baby since he doesn’t yet grasp spoken language, body language, the world he lives in, or anything at all, he nevertheless exerts tremendous efforts to do so. Imagine that we are in this baby’s place; that is the exact same state described for us by The Book of Zohar.

We stand before big adults (the Kabbalists) who tell us about a world, which we neither know nor understand. But there is a critical difference between a baby in this world and us as babies in the spiritual world, and that’s the baby’s natural, inherent instinct to attain the world. It is a great desire to attain which defines an infant’s whole life, whereas we must create that same great desire to attain the spiritual world within ourselves, by absorbing this desire from our environment. Thus the environment functions as the organs of that same body, which are particles of our own soul that we unite together and attach to ourselves, so as to attain this whole system.

Anatomy Of The Soul

clip_image001Suppose we are reading a book about the functioning of our physical body. It explains how our brain, heart, liver, and other organs work, how they exchange substances, what happens when we feel or eat something, how our blood and other fluids circulate, how electric signals transmit; basically it describes how our physiology works.

Listening to a lesson in human anatomy and physiology we learn about parts of the body and how all components of one body act together, each in its own place in accordance with its function, resulting in the sensation of life. Likewise, this is how The Zohar describes the physiology of a soul’s body (Kli), its organization, internal connections, and functionality. In reading it and by applying effort to our studies, we gradually start to reveal our soul, in which we attain revelation of the whole world and the Creator.