Question: After the generation that came out of Egypt died out and was replaced by the next one, Moses tells the new generation: “Remember Egypt.” But how can they remember it if they were never there?

Answer: There is no such thing as “they were never there.” After all, this is not about physical bodies but about spiritual states.

The Torah speaks of people who have gone through all the stages from Abraham, and in some sense even from Adam, to Egypt, and exited it with a great desire, with immense emptiness, with the “darkness of Egypt,” and now they feel that darkness as a desert.

The fact that they no longer care already indicates a correction: nothing grows here, fine; nothing gives fruit, fine. They are ready for anything, so long as they can rise above the Egyptian darkness, which evoked a negative attitude in them toward themselves and toward the Creator. Now they want to bring themselves to a state that even slightly resembles Him.

Therefore the state of the desert becomes desirable for them. Even if I have nothing, and I find myself in a state of complete emptiness, I am still glad of it compared to the state I was in before, where I enjoyed all sorts of egoistic acquisitions and felt at ease under Pharaoh’s rule.

Now it is the Creator who governs me. Although I do not see any fulfillment of my egoism in His governance, I perceive it as goodness. Even though I walk on hot sand without water, surrounded by snakes and scorpions, I rejoice in this desert because in it, the Creator rules over me. He goes before me and shows me the way, whether through a pillar of fire or a cloud.

Through the rejection of egoistic fulfillments, I feel that by rising above my ego, I am already following Him even into the desert.

This is the generation that must be born in the desert and enter the Land of Israel. That is, I have gone through all the inner stages from the Babylonian egoism that developed in the generations of the forefathers, then through the generation of Egypt, and later Mount Sinai and the desert. Now I approach the state called the “Land of Israel.” In doing so, I have built all these states within my egoistic desire.
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From KabTV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 3/16/16

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