The main difficulty is that we cannot know what spiritual work is. It is neither in our sensation, nor in our intellect.
From the outset, we are people who belong to this world. We work with, understand, and discuss what we have in this world. It’s our life. The definitions in this world create a work space in us. Our world is full of definitions of receiving or giving in order to receive, within which we have greater or lesser sensation.
Our definitions accord to what pleases and pains us. This is because we are matter that desires to enjoy. Therefore, I can hear sounds, smell scents, and see things, their width and size, even though they seemingly don’t interest me. It doesn’t matter what it is, maybe it is mechanical phenomena: I always translate things into emotions. Then, in terms of whether or not I feel good, I process, feel, and live in those emotions, because whatever doesn’t enter my sensation doesn’t exist to me. I don’t see it, and really, it doesn’t exist because the world only exists in the field of my sensation: the desire to receive, to enjoy.
Therefore, we are programmed and created as sensing creatures, and what we enjoy and don’t enjoy is clear to us from our experience. As such, we form a picture of the world.
How does this relate to the wisdom of Kabbalah?
I started feeling bad in our world. Many people feel bad. You could even go as far as to say that most people feel bad. Also, it’s not just people, but the still, vegetative, and animate. However, other than feeling bad, i.e., I started feeling something unpleasant. Together with that, I start feeling an attraction to a different state. This is considered as the point in the heart waking up in my heart. Then, I start searching with this point: where is it pulling me? What does it want from me?
I arrived at the wisdom of Kabbalah. I started hearing all kinds of things, but I don’t know what is being taught. I could be studying for years, but I don’t exactly know what I’m studying. I turn up like a child who was sent to school. He doesn’t know why he’s there, but he’s there because all the other kids are there. Or maybe I feel comfortable here with my point in the heart. I feel somewhat at peace, secure, and that a good future awaits me.
But what is Kabbalah? I don’t understand it.
If you’d ask me, I could explain it using words that I read. But it’s not mine. Why? It’s because, again, the world that the wisdom of Kabbalah speaks about is not my world. It is something that I have neither in my understanding nor in my sensation.
I remember that when I was with Rabash, I used to sit at all kinds of meals, at the Kiddush he conducted during the Sabbath where he used to give all kinds of explanations on various articles and whatnot, and he would always talk about faith above reason, that everything is attained in faith above reason.
I understand what faith means. Faith means “I believe.” What does it mean “to believe”? It means that “I believe a certain thing exists.”
Why? Do you have proof?
No. If there were proof, then it would be knowledge. If there is no proof, then it is faith.
What, then, do you believe?
“I believe in God. It is what’s written.”
You believe in “Him”? That’s even more ambiguous.
What, then, is faith?
Kabbalists in the past, who started discovering the spiritual world—the quality of bestowal, love of others, “love your friend as yourself,” “love will cover all crimes,” where they started attaining that quality in their connection—named it “faith,” because it is the degree of Bina. There was never any other definition of the word “faith.”
However, afterward, when they started falling from the degree of faith, from the degree of bestowal and love—there is faith as “bestowal in order to bestow,” and complete faith as “reception in order to bestow”—and when they started falling from that degree, they held onto the understanding that it is correct, that they felt it in the past, and they were connected to many Kabbalists surrounding them in that same period, which was over 2,000 years ago, and they called their feeling “faith.” Then, the term “faith” started becoming tainted. It started becoming interpreted as “knowing as fact”: “knowing” not in terms of knowledge, but just accepting that it is how it is.
Therefore, until today, the concept of faith is very vague. We live in a way where everyone believes in what he thinks he needs to believe in.
Also, “faith above reason” is an incredibly difficult concept. We need to explain it to ourselves, beginners, and whoever studies with us. Faith above reason is the construction of the spiritual vessel, where we build the vessel of bestowal upon the vessel of reception, and as such, make spiritual progress.
It is thus very important for us to make a dictionary of correct definitions of the wisdom of Kabbalah by which we can show everyone how it speaks about a different reality, and how words that appear to be familiar to a person in this world immediately get defined differently in the wisdom of Kabbalah, by people in spiritual attainment.
That is also one of the difficulties we have in coming to revelation from the disturbances, where disturbances support revelation. Disturbances become supportive when we know how to accurately define them. That’s the difficulty. We will need to build that dictionary within us of accurate spiritual definitions to replace corporeal definitions so that we will clarify what is happening from now onward, where there is nothing in reality but the desire and the light that acts on it, and the desire needs to be defined properly, with real definitions, i.e., according to the extent in which the light acts on, divides, and hierarchizes it. That’s how we need to approach the wisdom of Kabbalah.
From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/23/18
Related Material:
Kabbalah, The Most Realistic Science
This World Is A Dictionary Of Spiritual Terms
Who Invented The Language Of Branches
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Question: You say that one doesn’t need any special intellectual aptitude to study Kabbalah, that the only thing needed is to attract the upper Light. Wouldn’t it be best if you just had uneducated students?
