5 Minutes Of Light From The Daily Kabbalah Lesson: What Is The Creator?
Posted on September 14th, 2009
A person thinks that when his life is over, he will receive a reward in the world to come for having behaved well and being faithful, as well as for having carried out all that was demanded of him by his religion. But what can he receive if he did not prepare his desires for it?
His desires are for the pleasures of this world – pleasures that don’t exist in the spiritual world! A person’s primitive imagination made him decide to collect as much “stuff” as possible from this world in order to take it all with him to the grave.
If we think of the Creator as a king-like character for whom we must work, then we are like the religious people. The Creator is within us; He is the quality of bestowal and love which we have to acquire here and now.
Therefore, we have to work on ourselves in order to correct ourselves, rather than to be rewarded or punished by some contrived powerful ruler. This is Kabbalah’s difference from religion, and the reason why we need the force of correction – the force of Kabbalah, or the Torah. It’s because its Light returns us to the Source – the Creator.
A question I received: It is written, “What’s important is not your reward, but who you are working for.” How can I be thinking about this, instead of the reward?
My Answer: These words may confuse you. Who am I working for? For myself, and no one else! It’s forbidden to imagine the Creator as any image or form. The Creator is the quality of bestowal which we have to reveal within us. Therefore, the answer to the question, “Who am I working for?” depends on who I identify myself with.
If I identify myself with my egoistic desire, then I will think that I am working for the Creator. Alternatively, I can identify myself with the point in the heart, which is the quality of bestowal – the embryo of the soul. This will mean that I want to attain the quality of bestowal, called the Creator; I want it to manifest inside me.
By definition, the Creator is Boreh, from the words Bo – come, and Reh – see. This means that you have to discover this quality inside you. So, there is no one outside of me that I’m working for. I am working on my own correction in order to attain bestowal and love, which are called “the Creator.”
On the other hand, if I will imagine that the Creator is somewhere outside of me and I have to work for Him, to carry out His desires, then I will not be interpreting the Kabbalistic texts correctly. This is exactly how the religion of Judaism came to be, when the people lost their inner sensation of the Creator during the fall of the Second Temple. Later on, Christianity and Islam also originated from Judaism. These religions depict the Creator outside of a person, separate from him, instead of inside him.
During the period of the Second Temple, the Creator disappeared from man’s sensations and became concealed from him. Thus, people lost the correct picture of the world, because they started thinking that the Creator is someone that exists separately from them, that He isn’t a quality that becomes revealed inside them. They started believing that they have a Master they have to work for, like slaves. All the religions are founded on this false interpretation of the Creator’s essence.
Instead of thinking of the Creator as the main, most important quality of creation, which becomes expressed inside a person, people started thinking of Him as an external individual that sits somewhere up in the clouds and pulls the levers controlling our lives. This is why it’s so important to learn the correct Kabbalistic definitions, as otherwise it’s very easy to make mistakes and bring everything down to regular religion.
In Kabbalah, the rules are explained very simply: There is no Light without a Kli; there is no Creator without creation, Boreh = Bo + Reh, and so on.
(From the Preparation to the Daily Kabbalah Lesson)
A question I received: I simply don’t understand what the meaning of life is. I understand that maybe you can think up a meaning yourself. I can also do this but I won’t believe it. For now, I don’t understand what I should strive for. I don’t know what I can do or what direction to take.
Yes, it is possible to change, to develop, to realize oneself, to become like the Creator…but, what for? How can one strive to become similar to someone who you do not know?
My Answer: If you don’t have this need, you can relax. This means that you are not yet ready for Kabbalah. When the need arises, you can come back to it! The study of Kabbalah is for those who ask about the meaning of life, have not been able to find the answer and who cannot exist without finding it!
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A question I received: Would you be kind enough to explain the reason that the Creator created us in this form, with only the will to receive. Why do we have to go through this process at all? Why couldn’t we be created more like the Creator? Doesn’t the whole creation look like a game to you?
My Answer: You are perfectly right: the whole of creation is the Creator’s game with which he plays with His creation! The purpose of creating us in a quality that is opposite to the Creator is exactly for us to remain creatures that are different from Him, so that when we attain Him and become equal to Him, we will not vanish into Him.
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The following discourse took place while we were reading the “Preface to the Sulam Commentary” at the Daily Kabbalah Lesson:
I am a black dot in an ocean of Upper Light. My entire existence is connected to this Light, and I assess myself with respect to it. I discover that He is good and bestowing with respect to me. Conversely, I am the receiver who wants to devour and use Him. I learn that our two natures, that of the Creator and the creature, are polar opposites. And when I compare myself to Him, I discover that there is an abyss separating us, because everything that exists in Him exists in me in the opposite form, like an imprint of a seal. And I am overtaken by shame! He is bestowing and full of love, while I am receiving and full of hatred…
This shame is unlike anything I have ever felt before – and it is the true creature. I have never sensed such a profound awareness of myself. I begin to regard His bestowal as good, and my reception as evil. But where is this measuring scale coming from? It didn’t exist in the Light! This is the true creature. It feels independent and separate from the Giver, and therefore, it realizes that it is opposite to Him.
This goes on until the creation comes to feel that it can no longer remain in this state; it cannot justify itself, and for this reason, it performs a restriction and expels the Light from itself.
This is Malchut of the World of Infinity, which suffers because it cannot be like the Creator – it cannot love like He does. That is why all the development following the First Restriction (Tzimtzum Aleph) ultimately brings us to love – to the same attitude as the Creator has for us. Everything stems from the action of the First Restriction, so much so that the decision to perform the restriction drives the whole universe and leads to its final correction.
Therefore, the sensation of shame was that “Big Bang” from which the whole universe had come into existence and traversed its entire path, down to our world and back up above.
The driving force of this development, causing reality to unfold from above downward and from below upward, is that very sensation of shame that was felt by Malchut of the World of Infinity. There is nothing else. It is like the Big Bang from which the universe was created and continues to expand evermore to this day.
All this transpires in the Malchut of the World of Infinity, which contains all nine preceding Sefirot.
People don’t understand what The Book of Zohar actually is. When I just started studying Kabbalah, I was told that The Zohar is Musar (ethics) according to Kabbalah. Musar is a system of moral values, telling people what they should be doing and what they are forbidden from doing because they will be punished for it. These people believe that The Book of Zohar is a book of morals on a higher level, like a decree from Above.
Baal HaSulam writes that many horrible things took place in the world because The Book of Zohar was revealed before the time was right. The Zohar was only supposed to be revealed during the time of the Ari. Why is that? When a person who hasn’t been properly prepared for reading The Zohar reads it, he will not understand it correctly. He will not arrive at the same thoughts and intentions that Rabbi Shimon had when he wrote this text.
This is why Baal HaSulam added his own commentary, titled “Sulam” (Ladder), which includes a “technical” supplement to the text of The Book of Zohar. There he provides a Kabbalistic definition of every word of the Torah and explains where each word or quality is located in the structure of the soul.
This enables the person reading the text to connect both definitions, and thus to experience an inner response to what he is reading. Both worlds become revealed to him – this world and the Upper World, and he senses the Creator’s governance inside the text and inside himself.
(From Part 2 of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson, on the “Preface to the Sulam Commentary”)
A question I received: We know that egoistic desires motivate us to battle laziness. So, if a person corrects his egoism, what will act as a stimulus for him? Every system has elements that help control it. So who or what will carry out this function in a non-egoistic society? How will we choose the managers?
We know that many people work in fields where they produce things a person can do without. What will happen to these people? By correcting their egoism, won’t an altruistic society become helpless against the egoistic society?
My Answer: Everything in the world is controlled by the forces of nature, so the more we correspond to them, the better off we will be, and our society will be better as well. If we only produce the things that are necessary, then everyone will have time left over for spiritual work, for studying Nature (the Creator). Then we will reveal abundance, according to the law of balance with Nature.
We don’t have to worry about what is not up to us – leave that to the Creator. The purpose of our lives is to change ourselves in order to become similar to Nature (the Creator). This will give us prosperity.
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It is necessary to understand that the same system in which we now exist, gradually moves us toward the spiritual system, and then to the Creator. The system of all the worlds is one. Granted, our world is cut off from the spiritual world, but it has the same parts: “world-year-soul.” Through this world, I enter the spiritual world. And once I do, then through the words that I read in the books of Kabbalah, I begin to reveal a greater depth in the system.
This is how I acquire a connection with the Creator, who is inside these actions. From these actions I attain His mind and His intentions toward me. This is how I gradually study myself, the Creator and the entire system.
All of this becomes revealed to me as a science. In addition, I suddenly discover how much my actions influence the whole system, because it is integral. I discover that I can incorporate myself into the whole system; I can be simultaneously present in all its parts and feel all the changes happening in it. This is the meaning of acquiring a spiritual Kli.
After that, one’s development only takes place inwards. It’s similar to how we gradually get to know a person.
The Creator’s concealment exists only relative to me. To the degree I advance spiritually, I myself start to desire His concealment, similar to playing a game. For the Creator, however, there is no game: He knows everything since everything is Him. But as for me, I don’t want to know anything ahead of time; I desire concealment, because it gives me a place to express myself independently of His control.
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