MAN is an acronym for Mei Nukvin (female waters). A woman in Kabbalah is always associated with desire, a man with bestowal. A woman is a desire to receive, a man is a desire to give. Therefore, female waters means the rise of desire from the bottom up to the Creator. Moreover, they encourage the Creator to begin creation, correction, and fulfillment of these desires. In this case, requests from the bottom up are called prayer or MAN.

Question: Is that the MAN (manna) mentioned in the desert?

Answer: This is the MAN (manna), which the Torah says that every morning people picked up and fed on it.

Question: Very often in Kabbalah the term Machsom [barrier] is used. What does it mean?

Answer: Machsom is a state that a person must go through along the path from the sensation of only our world to the sensation of the upper world. In other words, this is the borderline between ours and the spiritual world, a kind of psychological barrier.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 6/17/19

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Question: Why is the spiritual world called “upper”?

Answer: We call it the upper because it is above our properties. Our properties are the properties of receiving, and therefore, we are very dependent on our egoistic desires and their fulfillment.

And the upper world, these are properties that consist of the desire to give, fulfill, love, and nourish others. Since they (the properties) are independent, free in their essence, they are called upper.

In addition, they are closer to the Creator in their attributes. He is absolute bestowal and love. And therefore, everything that is closer to Him, we define as above us, i.e., closer to the root cause.

Question: Speaking of the upper world, we often call it spiritual. What does the word “spiritual” mean?

Answer: The upper world is called spiritual because it is not material.

Question: Is there a difference between the terms “spiritual world” and “upper world”?

Answer: No, these are common, unspecified names.

Question: What is spiritual attainment?

Answer: The comprehension of nature in the quality of bestowal, equal to the Creator, is called spiritual attainment.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 6/17/19

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Question: Does the point in the heart awaken by itself or does anyone help it?

Answer: The point in the heart awakens by itself when a serious attraction to the attainment of the upper world, to one’s fate, and to the system of the upper providence is revealed in a person. Questions such as, “What is happening to me and how does the world go round?” stem from the point in the heart.

Question: Are there any specific signs according to which we can be certain that the point in the heart has been revealed?

Answer: The revelation of the point in the heart and its opening are expressed by a person’s attraction to the attainment of the meaning of life. It is when he is not satisfied by watching a movie or by reading a novel or so on, but by attaining the meaning of life more seriously.

If a person must really know what he is living for and if he doesn’t there is no meaning to his life, that is the point in the heart.

Question: Corporeal sciences have evolved over time. Hunger has forced man to observe the vegetative world and to explore it, and this is how botany developed. Diseases and the ways of healing them led to the development of medicine. Building houses and establishing useful mechanisms led to the development of mechanics, and this led to the development of physics.

Does the same process take place in the wisdom of Kabbalah? Do we attain this knowledge by our exertion and our experience and does it develop together with us?

Answer: Of course. This is how we have revealed the wisdom of Kabbalah throughout all this time, as a result of our great desire to attain the world in which we live.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 2/2/20

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The Confrontation Between the Maccabees and the Hellenists

Question: What was the ideological conflict between the Maccabees and the Hellenistic Jews?

Answer: The opposition was that the Maccabees were in favor of uniting the people under one common principle so that all were like brothers who felt the inner unity of each other.

And the Hellenists were for proclaiming each person free, independent, not worshipping the one God, i.e., the one force, nature, and, accordingly, the one uniting principle. Each person chose from a large host of gods to worship, as in ancient times when people worshiped trees, stones, celestial forces, stars, etc.

As a result, there was a huge difference between them in their ideology, behavior, and attitude toward each other. In principle, the Hellenists existed each by himself. Their state was held only by bayonets, despite the fact that later they were guided by reasonable methods borrowed from the Jews after the conquest of Israel.
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From KabTV’s “Systematic Analysis of the Development of the People of Israel” 7/8/19

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Question: As soon as my egoism gets bigger and the influence of the light diminishes, I find myself in descent. And vice versa, when the light covers my egoism, the ascent happens. Is this like physics?

Answer: Certainly, this is physics! But we don’t want to take it into account. We give ourselves up to our feelings. And in general, this is an absolute reality. Kabbalah has everything: formulas, graphs, and diagrams. Kabbalah is the foundation of all other sciences, the qualities and actions of nature.

Question: Does this mean that it is possible to look at the still, vegetative, and animate nature, take all the laws from there, and simply apply them to human society? And that is the right thing to do?

Answer: Relatively, but not everything! Because the still, vegetative, and animate levels are our animate part, and our human part is attained by the science of Kabbalah.

Comment: In physics, there are clear laws of interaction between physical bodies in the universe. And in the human society there are no clear laws of our communication. People don’t even know how to interact with each other properly.

My Response: Unfortunately, there is no such science in our world that addresses the level of Man (Adam).

Question: Maybe there is some kind of universal law?

Answer: Universal law, of course there is one, but it is studied only in Kabbalah. It is the law of the correct interaction of people and their relationship to the still, vegetative, and animate nature and the Creator. It consists in the fact that a person must rise above his egoism and work not only with a negative force, but also with a positive one at the same time.

Our egoism is a negative force. It presses us and pushes us only toward grabbing everything that exists from this world. And the science of Kabbalah explains in what way it is possible to compensate it with the quality of bestowal, for both forces to be equal and compensate each other. Then we will be in balance. This we need to achieve.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 3/27/19

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Turning Kabbalah into Philosophy

Comment: German humanist Johann Reuchlin, in his book On the Art of Kabbalah writes: “Nevertheless, the superiority of Pythagoras did not come from the Greeks, but again from the Jews. After long wanderings, he brought home something worthy of admiration, and was the first to rename ‘Kabbalah’ into ‘Philosophy’—a Greek word previously unknown.”

There are many facts that confirm that the ancient Greeks learned from the sages of the First and Second Temples. You can tell that the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle are permeated with their ideas.

My Response: Greek scholars did not hide it. Communication was quite easy in those days. Today, there are many civilizational barriers.

Although there seems to be a connection between modern universities; nevertheless, internal egoism repels one scientist from another. In ancient times, learning from each other was generally accepted. Therefore, many philosophers and scientists learned from the Jews during the time of the prophets, meaning in the time of the First Temple.

Comment: The Rabbi of Sochaczew wrote: “The Greek science of philosophy, derived from the writings of King Solomon, emerged after the destruction of the First Temple. However, these writings were corrupted with additions, omissions and replacements to such an extent that false knowledge got mixed into it. But, one way or another, the basis of the science is good although parts of evil got mixed in with it.”

The modern day Kabbalist of the 20th century Baal HaSulam similarly writes: “Sages of Kabbalah observe philosophical theology and complain that they have stolen the upper shell from their wisdom, which Plato and his Greek predecessors had acquired while studying with the disciples of the prophets in Israel. They have stolen basic elements from the wisdom of Israel and wore a cloak that is not their own.”

My Response: The truth is that the ancient Greeks acquired the general approach to cosmology from Kabbalah and proceeded to derive their own conclusions from it.
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From KabTV’s “Systematic Analysis of the Development of the People of Israel, Part 6,” 7/8/19

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Question: Baal HaSulam, in the Introduction to the Study of the Ten Sefirot, writes that only while reading the original source do corrective lights act on us. And how do we attract light during a workshop if we don’t read anything?

Answer: All the time, we go by the original source according to the articles of Rabash, Baal HaSulam, or the Ari.

We take the most vivid passages from there so that they excite us, clash us, and give us the concept of contradictions and on the basis of these materials, we could better study the issues that we touch on.

We by no means teach anything other than the original sources; together we find out what is written in them and pass it through ourselves. In this case, a lot of internal actions are performed.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 3/1/20

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Rabash, “Article 24”: You must always be on guard, both when you feel the state of the day, and when you feel the state of the night. You are obliged to awaken the hearts of your friends, and thanks to this you will be honored to awaken the Creator’s love towards us.

If, despite the fact that you feel day or night, good or bad, understanding or incomprehension, you always think not about yourself but about awakening the hearts of your friends, then you definitely move forward.

Despite any clouding, misunderstanding, or, conversely, seeming complete clarity and desire to find out what is in the spiritual world, the connection between friends always remains more important. It is in the connection between them that you will begin to feel the Creator.
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From Kab TV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 3/1/20

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What is Kabbalah from a perspective of a person practicing it?“

The wisdom of Kabbalah was made in order to guide us from our lives in this world to the attainment of the upper, spiritual world, and explains the absolute and fixed laws acting in both realities.

Using the wisdom of Kabbalah according to its intended purpose—bringing us attainment of the spiritual world—we gradually rise in our consciousness, perception and sensation of reality, eventually reaching, as Baal HaSulam described, the “exalted goal” of nothing less than the revelation of the Creator during our lifetime.

Who or what is the Creator?

The Creator is nature’s loftiest integral force, which includes the entirety of creation, everything that exists on its still, animate, vegetative and human levels.

When we understand how the Creator acts toward us, we can then understand the genuine causes of everything unfolding in our lives, and how to optimally respond to every situation in life.

The more we put the wisdom of Kabbalah to practice in our lives, the more we see exactly why and how we participate in creation, in nature.

In our era, more and more people feel the need for what the wisdom of Kabbalah provides, because as Kabbalists throughout history explained, specifically our era is the one when humanity would awaken en masse with questions about life’s meaning and purpose.

Our evolution is driving us all toward the revelation of the Creator. It is a process of accumulating suffering and deficiency. The wisdom of Kabbalah enters this process as a means to sweeten it, so that we don’t have to develop painfully, but increase our awareness of what is happening, and by doing so, experience the process much more enjoyably.

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Question: As an average person, I would like to understand: what do I gain by studying the wisdom of Kabbalah?

Answer: Living in this mortal world, you will exist for a certain number of years and then abandon it, leaving practically nothing but some garbage, just like each and every one of us in this earthly life. Kabbalah teaches that in this life, in this world, in our time, you can attain the spiritual world, as if you are already above our world, absolutely not leaving it, not dying.

You simply neutralize your egoism that depicts this world to you and start seeing the world of forces and properties called “the spiritual world.” When you reveal it, you can exist in it even today, control our corporeal world from there, and live in the two worlds simultaneously.

In this case, the death of your body will not be something tragic, unexpected, or special for you because while living in this world, you are in contact with your eternal part, with the soul. And then you will rise in your understanding, in the revelation of the soul higher and higher. Therefore, it is desirable to at least a little, in some way, adhere to your eternal part.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 1/26/20

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