Why Was The Truth Hidden For So Many Centuries?

Question: Why was the real meaning of the Torah hidden for all these years? Why wasn’t each person taught to understand it correctly in the spiritual sense?

Answer: The people of Israel were deliberately sent into exile. It was clear to Kabbalists that the exile was coming even before the destruction of the Temple, to the loss of the feeling of the Creator and the fall into darkness.

It is written in the Talmud that Rabbi Akiva was laughing at the ruins of the Temple because he was glad that the final correction was approaching. The destruction happened because the people of Israel had to go into exile and connect themselves to the soul of the nations of the world.

While in exile among other nations, the Jews transmitted their bases, their informational genes. A mutual penetration into the desires of each other took place, in which all of humanity becomes ready to study Kabbalah and with its help becomes closer to the revelation of the Creator.

After all each person has to attain the Creator, as it is written, “All will know Me from the smallest of them to the greatest of them,” “My house will be called the house of prayer for all the nations, and all the nations of the world will gather in it.”

Question: So why was the wisdom of Kabbalah been hidden?

Answer: Kabbalah was hidden because the people of Israel had to mingle their desires with the desires of the peoples of the world. And for this, they had to go into exile in a state where they had no connection with spirituality.

Instead of spiritual attainment, Jews received a religion (Judaism) and other nations had their religions. In this way Jews became close to the other nations and were able to mingle with them.
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Israeli Radio Program 103FM, 2/28/16

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Question: In quantum physics there is an established size (stable, unchangeable, constant size) that is called “the fine-structure constant” which determines the structure of the microcosm and equals – 137.066….

The Gematria of the word “Kabbalah” is equal to 137. Is it possible to determine that the wisdom of Kabbalah is the spiritual root of the structure of the microcosm? If so, then what does a fractional part represent? Are there fractions in Gematria?

Answer: Gematria cannot be considered without attaining the essence of the phenomenon it describes. So I suggest attaining the essence of the phenomenon, comparing them with our corrected nature, and then the knowledge of Gematria will be revealed to us.
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Question: The famous Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti believed that school’s should teach children about love and a holistic approach to life.

Krishnamurti said, “Man has built in himself images as a fence of security—religious, political, personal. These manifest as symbols, ideas, beliefs. The burden of these images dominates man’s thinking, his relationships, and his daily life. These images are the causes of our problems for they divide man from man.” (Krishnamurti, “The Core of the Teachings”) How does the wisdom of Kabbalah relate to this?

Answer: The wisdom of Kabbalah regards all the philosophies that speak about love and friendship positively. At the same time, it asks how do we implement this because this is the problem. Every person in the world will say that friendship is excellent! Love of others? Wonderful! Mutual help? Vital! But how do we fulfill it if we have a completely different nature? A person looks at everyone like a wolf, thinking about how he can grab them by the throat.

This is our egoistic nature. Man is a creature who is operated by a subjective egoism that only thinks about how to sustain itself in the most comfortable way. Therefore, the main problem is in the implementation. Where does one find the power to overcome the ego?

If we understood that egoism is bad, we probably could agree. At the same time, we don’t see any alternative for the ego. We don’t know how and cannot overcome it. Sometimes, we try to do good deeds, but we feel even worse than when we do bad deeds.

We need an upper force in order to overcome the ego, an upper force that is above our nature, above the ego. If we could find it in nature or somewhere to get it, and find a way to draw it, then we would have something we could talk about. If not, all of the wonderful projects and all of the philosophies remain merely theoretical.

Question: Despite the Indian philosophies of love and friendship, in India there is an untouchable caste.

Answer: It is indeed strange that there are sectors that are untouchable in a nation that speaks about love. If every religion is based on love, compassion, and sympathy, where is that love and sympathy?

In fact, there is a huge range of separation between people: caste, society, family, and clan. These examples clearly illustrate how sweet, but empty, such ideas can be. There are philosophies according to which you should sit and self-reflect.

Where is a person’s creativity? Is it inside himself? Searching within yourself will lead to nothing but mistaken philosophies and psychological methods to change a person, but it is impossible to change that way.

A person who has a certain character will remain the way he is unless an external force called the Upper Light will correct him systematically according to what the wisdom of Kabbalah says. It is our only hope.
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From KabTV’s “News with Michael Laitman” 6/19/16

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Question: What is the difference between the attitude of the Kabbalists toward the Torah and the attitude of the masses toward the Torah?

Answer: The masses believe that a holy person or an angel is engaged with the Torah, and that if a person actively performs Mitzvot (Commandments), he fulfills the Torah. The sages of Kabbalah believe that the Torah was not given to angels, but to humans. Therefore it is written, “I have created the evil inclination, I have created for it the Torah as a spice, for the light in it reforms it” (Babylonian Talmud, Kiddushin 30b).

Only someone who has an evil inclination, egoism, needs the Torah. This is what Rabash wrote in the article, “The Claim of the Angels” (Articles, Volume 3). In other words, the difference is in the relationship of a person to the Torah: either it was given for performing mechanical actions or for the internal correction of the person’s essence, egoism, and from it, the creation of the soul.
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New Life 502 – Magic For Sale
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and Nitzah Mazoz

Spiritual Weapons

Question: Is there really such a thing as magic or witchcraft? Can we use supernatural powers in order to change our reality?

Answer: No. In fact, the term “supernatural” needs to be reset. If we speak about what is above our nature, it includes all the natural phenomena.

We cannot influence the movement of the earth and other planets, but we can calculate them. Thus, many phenomena moved from the mystical realm to scientific concepts.

But at the same time, there are still many things we don’t know and the roots of which we cannot perceive, and this is an area we are still weak in, still faced with nature that we cannot calculate in advance. Meanwhile, man aspires for security; he needs an insurance policy for all his troubles.

This is where magic stems from. First it allegedly provides protection from any possible threat, including enemies, which a person can now resist with “spiritual weapons.” Second, there is the option to switch to the offense and establish one’s superiority, to clean the area of any troublemakers that stand in a person’s way.

The Supernatural, Affordable

Here many make promises declaring they know how it is done and that they will help a person if only they are paid for their services.

There are concepts such as black and white magic. The former is meant to cause harm and the latter promises to help a person. But this division is random, just like children play good and the bad guys. A person feels that he is weak when confronting the forces that determine his life. He would like to control his own fate and he goes to “experts” to hear their advice.

Moreover, the inevitable death of the body and the uncertainty about what lies ahead scare us. What will happen to my soul? Where will it end up? Can we avoid hell and guarantee ourselves heaven? People are very worried about these questions and others can make good money here.

Question: Does this mean that there is no magic?

Answer: No. But the problem is that anything that we attribute to a person’s internal world is related to his psychology. Consequently, a person can be influenced in a way that may seem like magic to him. This also happens with many religious people.

There is nothing we can do about it, since these are the properties of our psychology. Eventually it all stems from ignorance.
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From KabTV’s “New Life 502 – Magic For Sale,“ 1/18/15

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PARDESS Begins With Secrets

Question: If the Torah can’t be taken literally because it talks about the spiritual world, how can we understand what is written there?

Answer: Baal HaSulam explains in the Introduction to The Study of Ten Sefirot that the entire Torah is divided into PARDESS : Pshat (simple explanation), Remez (hint), Drush (allegory), and Sod (secret).

And as the Vilna Gaon explains study of the Torah begins from the secret, and not from the simple explanation. It means that it is attained in this order: Sod (secret), Drush (allegory), Remez (hint), and only at the very end Pshat (simple explanation).

When we begin to read the Torah we understand nothing in it and think that this is some kind of fairy tale or historical novel and nothing more. And therefore it is a secret to us.

And only later, through the study of Kabbalah, do we penetrate deeper into the Torah text and begin to understand what it says about the internal world, the forces of our soul, and the forces that control us. And then the Torah is transformed first into an allegory, then into a hint, and in the end, it becomes simple and easy to understand for us.
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Israeli Radio Program 103FM, 2/28/16

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Question: It seems impossible to get close to the Creator even by one millimeter during one lifetime. It is such hard work that sometimes you feel that you are too weak. What can we do about it?

Answer: You can overcome such states only by the help of the right environment. There is no other way! A person who sits by himself and has no one to study with is waiting in vain to succeed.

If a person studies the wisdom of Kabbalah, the study is fruitful of course. If one wishes to advance as fast as possible and in the right way, then he has to do so with the right group and by combining the group and the study correctly. One must find at least one partner, even virtually.
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From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 3/13/16

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In the News (Psychologies): “Each of us at least once had a sudden epiphany: all the known facts, like puzzle pieces, add up to one big picture, we did not notice before. The world is not so, as we thought. A person close – impostor. Why we do not notice the obvious facts and believe only to what we want to believe?

“Insights associated with unpleasant discoveries: betrayal by a loved one, betrayal by a friend, a loved one cheating. We repeatedly scroll pictures from the past and wonder – all the facts were before our eyes, why didn’t we noticed anything? We accuse ourselves of naivete and lack of attention, but they are not to blame. The cause is the mechanisms of our mind and psyche.

“The reason lies in the blindness of information on the neurobiological level. The brain is faced with a huge amount of sensory information that needs to be processed efficiently. To optimize the process, one constantly designs models of the world on the basis of previous experience. Thus, the limited resources of the brain concentrate on processing new information that does not fit into his model. …

“We ‘remember’ what is beneficial for us to remember at the moment, and just as easy to ‘forget’ the wrong information. …

“Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Daniel Gilbert (Daniel Gilbert) warned – people tend to manipulate the facts in order to maintain the desired picture of the world. This is how the defense mechanism of our psyche works. Faced with conflicting information, we unconsciously give preference to the facts that fit our picture of the world, and reject data that contradict it. …

“Our eyes only notice in the literal sense what it wants to find the brain.

My Comment: These facts are not new and have even been studied extensively, but the problem remains. Because our whole nature is a desire to receive and to enjoy—there is nothing more to us—everything is aimed only at our filling ourselves, despite the research results, we will still serve our desire blindly.

Only the wisdom of Kabbalah allows us to ascend above our nature, and then we will not see the distorted picture that our egoistic brain depicts for us, but the true picture of the world. It is upper world, the world above our narrow self-interest.
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Kabbalah Never Made Anyone Crazy

Question: Many people are afraid of Kabbalah because there are rumors that it can make a person crazy. Is this true? And if not, where did this opinion come from?

Answer: Baal HaSulam in Introduction to The Study of the Ten Sefirot and also the ARI and other great Kabbalists explained where such rumors came from. There is no danger at all in studying Kabbalah. In my life I have never seen that it made anyone crazy.

Although there are many people that start to study and stop and then get angry that Kabbalah allegedly didn’t meet their expectations. I receive indignant letters claiming that I didn’t want to open a door to the Creator for them. But I only teach on the basis of the original sources; everything else depends on the person.

This is the case with any study. When I graduated from the university I enrolled in graduate school and continued to study to get a PhD. And there were others who finished school somehow and didn’t want to study any further.

Everything depends on the person and on his desire. Anyone can study; the wisdom of Kabbalah doesn’t require any special abilities other than the desire.

Kabbalists themselves spread the rumors that Kabbalah can make a person crazy. After the destruction of the Temple people fell from their spiritual degree to unfounded hatred; therefore, Kabbalah went into hiding for 1,500 years until the time of ARI. And that is why the Kabbalists spread rumors that it is forbidden to approach Kabbalah.

And they succeeded so much that these myths are still alive even in our time, 500 years after the lifting of the ban. Chaim Vital, the disciple of the ARI, wrote in the sixteenth century that there is no prohibition on the study of Kabbalah.

Baal Shem Tov and other great Kabbalists, the founders of Hassidism, made every effort to disseminate the wisdom of Kabbalah. And nevertheless there are still a lot of myths about Kabbalah and many people, especially among Orthodox religious people, protest against its dissemination. There is no prohibition against it anymore; on the contrary, there is a duty to study it.
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Israeli Radio Program 103FM, 2/28/16

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Mysticism Or Science?

Question: It doesn’t matter how much you try to convince me that Kabbalah is a science, it still seems like mysticism to me. I don’t understand what makes it a science?

Answer: We explore our world through the five physical senses given to us from birth. This is the basis of science and all our knowledge about this world.

But there is another reality that we are beginning to reveal only recently with the help of modern physics. We discover that some kind of reality exists beyond our abilities to comprehend that is apparently an upper world or an upper dimension.

It implies an existence above time, motion, and space above all earthly limitations and beyond our universe. We can’t sense this reality because we are not set up for it; we don’t have suitable sensory organs.

The wisdom of Kabbalah is called so because it teaches how to receive (“Kabbalah” means “reception”). First of all, it builds new organs of perception in us. They differ from the common sensory organs because they sense matter outside themselves and not inside.

The five ways to perceive our world in physical sensory organs are called vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. And perception of the upper world that is higher than the usual physical one happens in five qualities called Keter, Hochma, Bina, Zeir Anpin, and Malchut.

Once we form these new qualities within ourselves through studying the wisdom of Kabbalah, we begin to feel a new world that we call an upper world. We begin to live in it to the extent that we feel it. So much so that even if our body dies in this world and we stop seeing and feeling our world through it, we are left to live in the upper world that we learned to feel during the life in our body.

And if we didn’t manage to reach the upper world, then we are born again in this world in an animal body and we receive an opportunity to reveal the upper world during our life in order to stay in it for the eternal life.
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Israeli Radio Program 103FM, 2/28/16

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