“The Secret Of The Book Of Zohar” (Linkedin)

My new article on Linkedin “The Secret of The Book of Zohar

This Thursday evening, we will celebrate LAG ba Omer, the 33rd day of the Omer count, which begins the day after Passover and ends forty-nine days later, on the eve of the holiday of Shavuot. The 33rd day is very meaningful for several reasons, but one in particular captivates millions around the world: On that day, nineteen centuries ago, was the conclusion of the writing of The Book of Zohar, the seminal book in the wisdom of Kabbalah.

When Rashbi and his ten completed writing the book, they realized that humanity was not ready for it. In order to use this book of love correctly, humanity needed to feel how deeply it is immersed in hate. At that time, even though they themselves were in constant flight from the Romans, who wished to kill them, they knew that as a whole, the world had not revealed how hateful human nature really is. As a result, in yet another selfless act, they concealed the book that they had written so arduously.

There is a good reason why this day is celebrated as a great day for humankind: The Book of Zohar was written in a special way and for a special purpose. It was concealed for a reason and was later revealed for just that reason. And these days, we are living out this reason.

Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai (Rashbi) was a great kabbalist. He attained the highest degrees of spirituality and his name is mentioned countless times in the Mishnah and the Gemarah, the fundamental books in Judaism. However, Rashbi’s uniqueness is not in his superior spiritual attainment, but in his relentless efforts to share it with humankind. The spiritual world is the complete opposite of ours. While our world is based on egoism and destructive competition, the spiritual world is the negative image of ours, consisting of pure love and giving. This is why The Book of Zohar stresses, “Everything stands on love” (VaEtchanan, Item 146).

The basic unit in the spiritual world consists of ten subunits. These subunits are unique, and often contradicting expressions of love and giving, which complement each other to form a strong and stable structure called Partzuf. These subunits of love are called Sefirot, from the Hebrew word sapir [sapphire], which unite into the basic spiritual unit, called Partzuf. Subsequently, Partzufim [pl. for Partzuf] join together and build the entire spiritual world. Because the Sefirot are expressions of love and giving, and they form all that exists in spirituality, the entire spiritual world is one of love.

Because our world consists of pure egoism, or as the book of Genesis tells us, “The inclination of a man’s heart is evil from his youth” (Gen. 8:21), we are completely disconnected from the spiritual world. In fact, we’re so opposite from it that we cannot grasp it with our senses.

But Rashbi, who dedicated his life to connecting humanity with this world of love, had found a way to bridge the chasm. Together with his son, he assembled eight keen disciples who were willing to dedicate themselves to this noble task as he was, and together, the ten of them formed a semblance of a spiritual Partzuf, which, as just said, also consists of ten Sefirot.

But the process was not easy. Rashbi and his disciples were human, and therefore inherently selfish. Forming a ten did not make them a spiritual Partzuf. They had to overcome their egoism in order to become similar to a spiritual Partzuf, which was a long and gradual process. But as they learned to become more spiritual, loving, they put their experiences down in writing, and thus wrote The Book of Zohar.

No one had done this before them, and no one has done it since. Bit by bit, they opened up their own egoism, prevailed over it, and wrote about it in allegories and in the language of Kabbalah. At the end of their spiritual journey, they had transformed their nature entirely from hatred to love, and shared it all with us in this magnificent book. This is why The Book of Zohar is so important to humankind, especially today, when hatred is overtaking every aspect of our lives.

In the portion Aharei Mot, Rashbi’s ten gave us a glimpse into the process of feeling the hatred and transforming it to love that they had experienced. They wrote, “‘How good and how pleasant it is for brothers to also sit together.’ These are the friends as they sit together, and are not separated from each other. At first, they seem like people at war, wishing to kill one another. Then they return to being in brotherly love.”

But Rashbi’s ten did not stop there; they also shared why they made all those efforts. In their words, “And you, the friends who are here, as you were in fondness and love before, henceforth you will also not part … and by your merit there will be peace in the world, as it is written, ‘For the sake of my brothers and my friends let me say, ‘Let peace be in you.’’” Indeed, they wrote The Book of Zohar not for themselves, but for the rest of the world to find peace and love.

However, when Rashbi and his ten completed writing the book, they realized that humanity was not ready for it. In order to use this book of love correctly, humanity needed to feel how deeply it is immersed in hate. At that time, even though they themselves were in constant flight from the Romans, who wished to kill them, they knew that as a whole, the world had not revealed how hateful human nature really is. As a result, in yet another selfless act, they concealed the book that they had written so arduously.

Over the centuries, humanity has revealed deeper and deeper layers of its nature, that indeed, it is all evil. When enough evil was revealed, The Book of Zohar was revealed once more. However, it was still not time for everyone to get to know it and be able to use it for its purpose: transforming hate to love.

Only now, since the end of the 20th century, our acknowledgement of our nature is sufficient for us to truly need this book of love and giving. This is why the greatest kabbalist in modern times, Rav Yehuda Ashlag, wrote the complete Sulam [ladder] commentary on The Book of Zohar, which explains every word in it, so we can all benefit from it and be able to transform ourselves the way Rashbi’s disciples did back when they wrote it.

Indeed, LAG ba Omer marks a very significant day in the history of humankind, when a rope was thrown to humanity to pull it out of the quagmire of hatred and into the pool of love that is the spiritual world.
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Names Of The Creator—The Measure Of Spiritual Ascent

95Question: What should one do if, for example: for you, the Creator is good, but for me, He is terrible. Does it mean that the Creator is totally different for us?

Answer: Of course. The Creator is different for each person and at every single moment.

Kabbalah explains this very simply: the upper light is at absolute rest. There are no changes in it, but it pressures the whole creation, and each element of creation calls the Creator by different names.

What is more, we do not randomly call the Creator the good that does good, evil, stubborn, or whatever names we may give Him. They simply indicate the way we perceive Him. That is, it is necessary to make corrections here.

The Creator is the absolute. If I feel that He is evil, it means that I have evil properties.

Therefore, I interpret all His positive impacts on me as evil. On the other hand, if I resemble the Creator, I feel His impact on me as good. It all depends on the extent to which I resemble the Creator.

Thus, the names of the Creator express the degree of my spiritual attainment, my spiritual compatibility with the Creator. The more I advance and the more I ascend to the Creator and resemble Him more and more, I speak of Him in a more positive way.

We can depict this as a scale on which there is a 100% compatibility with the Creator (plus), a 100% incompatibility with the Creator (minus), and in the middle, there is the neutral state (zero). Depending on where

I am on this scale, my properties are either more opposite or more similar to the Creator.
Usually, we are born and start our path in a neutral state: a little down, a little up, a little down, a little up, and so on.

Question: So, you want to say that from “the good that does good” I can come to “the evil and most terrible”? Can there be such an amplitude from the most negative perception of the Creator to the most positive perception?

Answer: This is the only amplitude there can be. Before I ascend to the level of complete correction, I am at the complete opposite level. Life is full of surprises.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 2/24/19

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Break The Vicious Circle

220Humanity in its development has advanced to the current level and now begins to understand that everything that society imposes on us, in principle, is to our detriment. We litter the environment, kill our life, disconnect from the family, from our children.

Instead of working a few hours a day and getting only the necessities of life, a person works twelve hours a day. For what? Only to produce what is considered valuable by society, otherwise, he will not respect himself, how he will look at his neighbors, and how his children will look at him.

It turns out that it is a vicious cycle created by us, which makes us much more unhappy than animals.

Question: A person is a desire to enjoy, he is drawn to what, as it seems to him, makes sense. He runs after some wrappings and thinks that in this he will find something, but in the end he finds nothing. What, in principle, is he to blame? And what is it all for?

Answer: So that we are disappointed in our natural, thoughtless, selfish development, and see how all this leads us to complete destruction. Look what families, children, and homes are now! All the most ordinary, natural, healthy, and normal suddenly disappears somewhere, distorts, and breaks. We cannot enjoy even such simple things.

We have invented all sorts of values and standards for ourselves, and we chase them. And as a result, we get depressed, which today is the first problem in the world, and we use drugs, otherwise we will not be able to keep up with this pace or this life in which I hate everyone, including myself.

Everyone needs a personal psychologist. Children at the age of twelve or thirteen leave home, break away from their parents. Where are they, what’s wrong with them?

Now a generation is growing that cannot get anything from us. We have nothing to give them. Baby animals are always raised by their parents. In this respect, we are the same animals. Who will bring up our children? What skills will they be able to acquire on their own? Imagine what kind of suffering they will have to go through in life before they find the correct algorithm of behavior.
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From KabTV’s “Close-Up. Marriage Contract” 8/19/09

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Individual Phenomenon

232.05Question: Can we say that faith above reason is associated with collective consciousness? Or is it still a purely individual phenomenon?

Answer: You can. But the fact is that even if I, together with others, form some kind of common system, some kind of dipole, it is still a bundle, and we still remain individualists.

Each of us is getting out of ourselves to connect with the other while maintaining our individualism. We cannot destroy it. We can reduce it, rise above it, and work with egoism in the opposite direction, but it still remains. Faith above reason exists as faith above reason because egoism remains, and we rise above it in altruism.
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From KabTV’s “Meetings with Kabbalah” 3/29/19

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Marxism And The Wisdom Of Kabbalah

025.01Question: To what extent is one of the main assumptions of Marxism justified from the point of view of the wisdom of Kabbalah, that “An idea that gets a hold on the masses becomes a material force”? Does Marxism have perspectives in a changing situation?

Answer: Certainly, when an idea gets a hold on the masses, it becomes the power of the masses. This has already become the power of the fist, coercion by this side or another. So, there is no connection or relationship to spirituality and the wisdom of Kabbalah.

The connection between Marxism and the wisdom of Kabbalah is only seen in a very inconsequential coincidence between the opinion of Marx and the state of a society that is beginning to develop through mutual cooperation with each other.

Marx also thought that everything depends on the education of the society and in no way did he call for revolutions that could lead to victory and could change something in a way like that.

Only a proper society can be changed and it must be educated like a small child is educated. A society is generally like a small child that can achieve good results through a proper education. And if not, it could create problems for you for generations.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 2/3/19

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Daily Kabbalah Lesson – 4/29/21

Preparation to the Lesson

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Lesson on the Topic “The Approach to Studying the Wisdom of Kabbalah”

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Selected Highlights 

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Audio Version Of The Blog – 4/28/21

Listen to an Audio Version of the Blog
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Mutual Guarantee—The Property Of Mutual Concern

943Question: What does the law of mutual guarantee mean? What does it mean—they vouch for each other? Why?

Answer: The fact is that at the lowest level, if we want to begin to master the spiritual property, the property of bestowal and love, we must realize it in ourselves in the form of mutual guarantee.

This happens within a group of people when they gather together and try to recreate the property of mutual care, love, mutual assistance, and with all their heart want to be one for all and all for one.

Question: And one person should examine it?

Answer: One person cannot do it. He must feel as a part of society. All this is realized in society.

Question: Does a person implement this law. but in relation to other people?

Answer: Yes.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 4/9/21

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Changing The Basis Of Existence

448.8Question: Why are life and death such sharp states? Before the beginning of life, a person does not feel anything, does not remember anything. After death, he feels nothing, remembers nothing. Life and death for him are probably the best and the worst thing that can happen.

Answer: The life of a person takes place in his egoistic desire. This is why it is so clearly defined from the beginning to the end, from birth to death. The opportunity that we are given is to rise above birth and death.

However, it is not given in order to some how extend life (something we would like to do), but to change the attitude toward it, in particular, to change the force at the basis of this existence—to make it altruistic instead of egoistic. Then we will not be feeling the influence of the egoistic force on us, that is, life itself, but we will be as if above it.

Question: But this clarity, this definition, it is good, is it not? Does it mean that in the other state, a higher one, everything will be clear enough?

Answer: Yes. In the quality of bestowal, contrary to the quality of reception that we now have, everything is also clearly defined, and in much greater intensity in quality and quantity.
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From KabTV’s “Kabbalah Express” 4/12/21

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Does A Soul Have A Place?

707Question: A person who lives in this world has his own place. This is his home, planet Earth, a place in space, a place in time. Does the soul have a place in which it exists?

Answer: The soul not only has a place, but it is a place in itself. There is no other place but the soul.

There is a so-called imaginary place called our universe. It is imaginary because it exists in the desire to receive, the egoistic desire. And there is a place called the soul, which is the desire to bestow. This place is really eternal and perfect.

Question: Is this place for humans?

Answer: This place is for us to discover and exist in.

Question: What is the connection between the soul and the “I” of a person?

Answer: The soul is my “I.”

We do not yet feel what the soul is because we do not have the quality of bestowal and love, and therefore, we have to meander along in this way, without a soul.
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From KabTV’s “Kabbalah Express” 4/12/21

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