A question I received: Can Kabbalah logically explain the connection between a particular blow and the lack of connection between people?

My Answer: As a consequence of the Egyptian plagues, Pharaoh’s sages concluded that the plagues had come from the Creator, telling Pharaoh: “It’s the Creator’s hand!” And although Pharaoh stubbornly contended: “Who is the Creator that I should listen to Him?” as a result of the blows, he gave in and freed his slaves.

Pharaoh is the egoism created by the Creator. The plagues are the suffering that is caused by our egoism, thereby revealing it. Because of the blows, we begin to hate our egoism and realize that the blows come from the Creator and are sent specifically so that we will desire to escape from Egypt and Pharaoh’s (egoism’s) rule over us.  We come to realize that our nature is not our own, but rather a force outside ourselves that has control over us.

By receiving blows caused by our egoism and aspiring to something higher through the “Moshe” in us, the Creator is revealed, and we see that the blows come from Him. Otherwise, we would come to hate Him.

A person should go through the process of developing hatred for his egoism,  tearing away from and parting with it, while coming closer to the quality of bestowal.  We are seeing that now is  the time when humanity is going through these very stages of development.

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In the News: (from The Alinga Consulting Group): “Crisis To Cleanse Russian Society, Says Country’s Chief Auditor” The Current economic and financial crisis will cleanse Russian society and will help create “an economy of happiness,” Sergei Stepashin, the chairman of the Audit Chamber says in an interview published by the Moscow-based Nezavissimaya Gazeta daily Wednesday. “I’m sure we’ll create an economy of the future, an economy of happiness for our people after we go through the cleansing with the aid of this crisis,” Stepashin says. He sees “a loss of connection” between business and morality as a major root-cause of the crisis. “We’ll get out of the crisis when we tie up economic activity to morals and business, to morality,” Stepashin says.

My Comment: Overall, he is right. But what do we have to do in order to attain the bright future about which he speaks? Kabbalah says that the only thing we have to do is to change man’s nature, which is something that can only be done by means of the force that created man.

The force that reforms human nature can only be attracted using a special method – Kabbalah. This is why the science of Kabbalah is known as “The work of God” – because it gives us the opportunity to draw the force of the Creator (Nature’s Upper Force) that will correct us. This is the only way we can succeed!

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In order to reach the purpose of creation, we need a special force – one that is external, existing outside of us. Without its help, all our efforts to reach the Upper World (or in other words, to perform acts of love and bestowal) will be futile. It is because our entire nature is the will to receive. Therefore, every action we make is done in order to fulfill ourselves. Even if we weigh in the needs of others, we do it out of fear or because the person we give to is so close to us that we feel he is a part of us.

The engine of all our actions is self-love. Therefore, we cannot truly care for others and bestow to them. We have a desire to fulfill ourselves at the expense of others, which is called “egoism.” This desire is what differentiates the human level from the animate one.

When man is uncorrected, he is worse than an animal, but when he attains correction, he becomes equal to the Creator. Every person in the world feels unique and exceptional, but when this feeling is coupled with egoism, it turns into the worst, most destructive force in Nature.

However, this too has a purpose: we have to discover the utter lowliness of this state in order to single out the corrupted form of the feeling of being unique, exclusive and exceptional. We will then be able to truly plead with the Creator, asking Him to change the way we use this feeling. It will then transform into goodness and love for all, where every person’s love for everyone will be unique and special.

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In the News (from CNN): “Pension guarantor: unprecedented deficit” The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., which guarantees private pension payments for 44 million Americans, said on Wednesday that it faces a massive, unprecedented deficit.

My Comment: It looks like we will have to build a new society from scratch. People will spend all the existing funds, and only when there isn’t anything left to spend will they stop and think about what is happening.

There is no means in our world to correct the current crisis! That’s because we were created by the Upper Force (the Creator, the force of altruism) and It endowed us with an egoistic nature. The Creator is waiting for us to desire to change our nature, and as soon as we desire this, He will change us.

Kabbalah teaches us how we can reach this recognition –  and the solution to the crisis – sooner.

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A question I received: Are there any people who are considered saints in Kabbalah? Does this concept exist? How can you explain the phenomenon of imperishable relics left behind by saints or holy people? This is a concept that exists in different religions. Is it possible that these people attained the quality of absolute love and bestowal during their lifetimes, and therefore they did not die, but their souls simply left their bodies? And is this considered sanctity?

My Answer: Man’s body is an animal that eventually dies and decomposes into the basic elements. And the soul bears no relation to the body. Baal HaSulam even used to say, “I don’t care where they bury my sack of bones.”

A holy man is someone who attains equivalence with the Creator while living in this world, by developing the desire to “love one’s neighbor as oneself.” As for the body, you can perform every imaginable organ transplant, you can replace all of the body parts, and you can perform blood transfusions. This will not affect the soul in any way. Doctors are already able to replace the heart, and soon they’ll even be able to perform brain transplants. That’s because our information is not stored in the brain, but in the field surrounding it.

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Baal HaSulam writes in the articles, “The Revelation of Godliness (Matan Torah)” and “The Arvut,” that the overarching purpose of creation is for the whole of humanity to reach its correction, known as equivalence of form with the Creator. All the souls have a part in reaching this purpose, because there is just one creation, but it is divided into many parts in order to make the common correction happen more easily.

But besides creation’s division into many parts or souls, all of creation is also divided into the following two parts:

• The part that received the method of correction and implemented it, but later fell back into egoism. This part of creation is called “the people of Israel.”
• The part of creation that did not receive the method of correction. However, when the first part fell, it came closer to the second part of creation, and now both can reach the general, complete correction of egoism in all of creation.

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Two questions I received about the Creator:

Question: Can individual souls attain the level of unity with the Creator or is this only possible with the help of all other souls?

My Answer: To unite with the Creator means to be similar to Him. Because He is the desire to bestow and to love, a person attains union with Him to the degree he attains the same quality or desire. The desire (or quality) to bestow and to love that develops within a person is called a soul.

Question: Why is the Creator characterized as Light or pleasure? Doesn’t this make Him limited and incomplete?

My Answer: All the limitations exist only within our desire to receive this Light, whereas the Light Itself is infinite.

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A question I received: The universal equality that you talk about is a little scary. If everyone is the same, then where is my uniqueness?

My Answer: Your uniqueness lies in the fact that everyone is incorporated inside you and you desire to bestow to everyone. You are the only one who can give them what you have to give.

However, if you want to bestow to them, you must first acquire all of their desires. You must make everyone’s desires become your desires. You will then transmit Upper Light to these desires, connecting them to the Creator. By doing so, you will be unique, like the Creator.

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A question I received: I’ve been reading your books for a while now. I grew up in a Christian family, but all my questions went unanswered. You mentioned many times that the Bible is not to supposed be interpreted literally because it is written allegorically. I was convinced of the same thing a long time ago. But why does the Bible use the notion of sacrifice for sin? Why is there a need for the commandments of the sin offering, considering that the most important belief in Christianity is that Christ offered himself in sacrifice for the sins of the world?

My Answer: The entire Bible (Torah) speaks about how to correct man’s egoism in order to reach the level of complete equivalence with the Creator. When the Bible enumerates all the possible sins, it is speaking of the revelation of the human ego.

This means that when a person reveals his own egoism, he feels that he is a sinner because he uses others for his own benefit. However, the Bible (Torah) also offers a solution, telling us how to correct our egoism. It explains the different levels of the ego (still, vegetative, animate and human) as well as the method of correcting the ego. More exactly, it tells us how to correct our intention from “for my sake” to “for the sake of others.”

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A question I received: Baal HaSulam wrote that the nations of the world “stole” the wisdom from Kabbalists. What does this mean?

My Answer: To “steal” means to use one’s egoistic desire. It is written that Adam HaRishon stole from the Creator, which means that he wanted to receive the Light of Hochma without clothing it in the Light of Hassadim. To steal means to receive for oneself, without the intention to bestow.

In the past, before the destruction of the Second Temple, the Jews did not conceal the wisdom of Kabbalah. They shared it openly with the nations of the world, which is what gave rise to all the earthly sciences that study Nature (the Creator’s hidden form), as well as philosophy (a system that uses the egoistic mind to make guesses about the Creator, who is concealed from the mind). Rav Kook wrote about the fact that philosophy originated from Kabbalah, as did Johann Reuchlin, a great philosopher of the 16th century, and many others.

When did Kabbalah become concealed? This happened after the nation of Israel fell from the high level of love for the fellow man into unfounded hatred. This, in turn, led to the destruction of the Second Temple. Rashbi, the author of The Book of Zohar, expressed great sorrow because from that point on, Kabbalah would have to be written in a form that concealed it from people, and this concealment would last until the 20th century. At that time, it would be revealed to the entire world, in order to benefit all the people.

Before the Second Temple was destroyed, there was no need to write about Kabbalah because people felt the Creator directly and the science of Kabbalah was simply their means of communication. However, if Kabbalah had not been “stolen,” humanity could not have developed. In order for humanity to develop, the egoistic desire has to contain a spark of Light that revives and sustains it. So, this spark of Light is what enabled humanity’s egoistic desires to develop from one generation to the next, causing progress in technology, culture, education and other social institutions.

Today, however, everything that the spark of Light had to give us has been realized. The ego has grown into one unified structure or system. It turned out that when egoistic individuals reached a connection among one another, they are no longer able to evolve egoistically, but can only degrade. This becomes expressed as a universal crisis in all areas man delves in, including culture, upbringing, science, trade and the economy.

From this moment on, we can use the science of Kabbalah to correct ourselves and our participation in the global system, until it will reach complete harmony.

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