Dear Friends, please ask questions about passages from the great Kabbalists. I promise to answer them. The commentaries in brackets are mine.

The Wisdom of Kabbalah and the System of Mussar (Ethics)

Many are mistaken and compare our holy Torah to ethics. But that has come to them because they have never tasted religion in their lives. I call upon them: “Taste and see that the Lord is good.”

It is true that both ethics and religion aim at one thing—to raise man above the filth of the narrow self-love and bring him to the heights of love-of-others. But still, they are as remote one from the other as the distance between the Thought of the Creator and the thought of people.

For religion extends from the Thoughts of the Creator, and ethics comes from thoughts of flesh and blood and from the experiences of their lives. Hence, there is an evident difference between them, both in practical aspects and in the final aim.
– Baal HaSulam “The Essence of Religion and its Purpose”

For the recognition of good and evil that develops in us through ethics, as we use it, is relative to the success of the society.With religion, however, the recognition of good and evil that develops in us, as we use it, is relative to the Creator alone, that is, from the disparity of form from the Maker, to equivalence of form with Him, which is called Dvekut [adhesion].
– Baal HaSulam “The Essence of Religion and its Purpose”

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