A Nation United By Sparks
Question: What is the “Nation of Israel?”
Answer: The “Nation of Israel,” just like any other nation, is a collection of different people, but, unlike other nations, they are united according to a special principle of “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”
Once, people used to live in tribes in ancient Babylon, and then they split up and dispersed in different directions and different nations that are corporeally connected, they were created by their corporeal desires.
In those days, Abraham collected about four or five thousand people out of several millions that made up humanity during the Babylonian age. Those who joined Abraham were people in whom the spark that yearned for something else was burning, the spark that evokes people to ascend above nature. They followed him with great hopes and expectations of finding the Creator.
They received from Abraham the method for the revelation of the Creator that allows a person to learn to love others in order to attain the love of the Creator thanks to this.
This group left Babylon even before the great dispersion and over time became the nation of Israel. First, the sparks were not united and everyone had different desires and could not unite.
However, Abraham began working with them and uniting them by a common idea and one goal, a perception that is above the egoistic desire.
He operated according to the principle that “Love covers all transgressions.” However, people can feel love only if the desire for pleasure grows in them. They acquire a sufficient power of rejection when they overcome it and ascend to love. Otherwise, the uncaring and alienation between them can extinguish any spark.
The dynasty of our forefathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob begins here. The group fulfilled its measure of initial unity, and then a new wave of ego covered it, and as a result, the successful and unsuccessful attempts to unite turned into a kind of work that we call the “exile in Egypt.”
It is the same group. No matter in which tent it dwells, what it studies, and in what it engages, its current state is simply called “Egypt.” “Pharaoh” appears between the friends, mutual hate, and the Torah, the method by which Joseph sustains the group, and later on, Moses.
Finally, the “study group” reaches an unbearable state because the ego simply tears them apart and they don’t know what to do with it. They really want to connect and to establish the mutual connection between them, but the ego separates them so much that they reach a dead end.
Then, they not only understand, but also enter a new state of the essential and vital need to escape from the “king of Egypt,” to exit self-love and transcend it.
Just imagine how strong you must be to hate the ego, how repulsive and unbearable it must seem so that you would “leap” and hold yourself above it. You simply don’t have the power to contact it, and this hate raises you. This is the meaning of the “exodus from Egypt.”
However, escape is not enough. How should we unite now? We still must coexist with the ego. In this state, the children of Israel stand before “Mt. Sinai,” not above hate, but rather, around it. Then, the Light comes, and thanks to it, they acquire the understanding of how to unite correctly, which means to use and to what extent to use the hatred in order to unite above it.
They begin to work mutually in different ways, and it is impossible to do so without incorporating the negative force. In order to receive the positive force, they make a covenant with each other, and between them and the Light, the Creator. Thus, their self-correction begins.
The group is the same group, but from now on it is a nation since now they really are united just like any other nation, but they are united in a collective desire, in sparks of bestowal.
The basis of their unity is not the ordinary corporeal desire for a good life in this world, but the necessity to live in the Creator, in the upper. In fact, the children of Israel also are attracted to the “good life,” but behind these words, there is already a different meaning. The term of what actually is “good” changes.
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From the 3rd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 05.22.13, “The Mutual Guarantee”
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Abraham, The Father Of The Kabbalistic Group
The Nation That Unites Above The Ego
Marching Into The Snake’s Jaws
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