There’s No Such Thing As Too Much Feeling
A question I received: How do we combine intellect and feelings?
My Answer: There is a scholastic approach widely used at schools and universities to convey knowledge. Often, however, without involving our feelings, we are unable to understand our teachers. For example, when studying music, a person has to hear it inside himself. He has to differentiate between its most minute shades and nuances. In other words, his feelings have to go together with his intellect, which, in turn, will make his feelings work.
The building material of the wisdom of Kabbalah is feelings, not intellect, because the matter of creation is desire. Therefore, we have to develop our desire, making it more sensitive and more complex. We have to fill it with impressions, crevices, and “cells” of the thinnest, most delicate emotions. In the same way, when a person who is not a wine expert tries a 200-year-old wine, he won’t be able to detect the same nuances as the expert who will experience an entire range of unique sensations. Yet, the wine expert wasn’t born that way; he developed this rich wine-tasting palette. We have to do exactly the same thing. We have a point in the heart, which is the initial impulse toward something. But toward what? That is something we don’t know yet because we can’t discern the details within our aspirations.
Thus, it’s essential for a person to develop his point in the heart. He must make it more voluminous so it well have enough room to accommodate the many details of his spiritual perception. It has to become capable of all the inner responses, the depth, height, colors, and tastes of the spiritual sense. This development occurs through one’s aspiration toward the spiritual goal. Thousands of feelings will show up as soon as we can sense them; everything is already there in the spiritual world. Our task is to develop the ability to feel them. In order to accomplish this, we need to aspire toward the Light, to long for the Light to descend upon us, correct us, and make us similar to it.
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