I once asked Rabash: “What does a Kabbalist feel when he parts with his body? After all, he already feels the soul through the point in the heart that he developed. He feels a different world through the quality of bestowal.” Rabash answered: “It’s similar to how you take off your shirt at night and throw it into the laundry, and then put on a new shirt in the morning. This is how a Kabbalist parts with his animate body and the sensations he feels through it, and continues to perceive through his soul.”

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News Report (on Nature): In an article called “Economics Needs a Scientific Revolution,” Physicist Jean-Philippe Bouchaud states that we can avoid global economic crises in the future by applying the approach of physics to economic models, thereby changing the economists’ system of thinking and training. He writes: “Compared to physics, it seems fair to say that the quantitative success of the economic sciences is disappointing. What is the flagship achievement of economics, apart from its recurrent inability to predict and avert crises, including the current worldwide credit crunch? Why is this?”

My Comment: The physicist is wrong! It’s easy for him to make these claims because he investigates the part of nature that’s revealed to us, or to our senses. Economics, on the other hand, is a science about human relationships, which aren’t clearly revealed to our senses. We don’t know ourselves as people. All the sciences reveal our world and us in it only on the still, vegetative and animate levels. The “human” level is unattainable to us. We can only study it if we rise to the level above it – the Creator’s level. In other words, we can study it to the degree we are similar to the Creator, or stated simply – when we become Kabbalists.

For this reason, we cannot come out of this global crisis until we begin changing ourselves as parts of a single system, all of whose the parts exist in harmony of all their desires, thoughts and actions. How can we do this? This is what Kabbalah explains to us.

Therefore, there are many new sciences ahead of us about the global system of humanity. Today there is a science that’s very much in demand – “Kabbalistic Economics,” or to be more neutral, “the economics of the global system.”

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A question I received: Please explain the meaning of the expression “Faith, hope and love” and their order in one’s spiritual work.

My Answer: First, a person must attain faith – the perception of the Creator. This perception gives him hope and confidence about his present and future, since the revelation of the Creator makes a person merge with Him like an embryo in a mother. Then, after experiencing all of the Creator’s actions and learning of their absolute goodness, a person starts to feel love for the Creator.

As you can see, everything comes from attainment, or learning things yourself. Kabbalah is the most practical science of all: it is studied inside and through oneself.

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Preface to the Science of Kabbalah (“Pticha”). Items 3-5, summary:

3. The order of distancing, of the weakening of the desire to bestow, resulting from the development and growth of the desire to receive, from above (from bestowal, similarity to the Creator) downwards (moving away from Him) – happens along five degrees or five worlds: Adam Kadmon, Atzilut, Beria, Yetzira, and Assiya. The World of Assiya includes our world (HaOlam Hazeh). “World” – Olam comes from the word Olama – concealment, because to the degree one grows distant from similarity to the Creator, the Creator becomes concealed.

All creatures originate and have their root in the World of Infinity, in the Thought of Creation to “delight the creatures,” in their initial state.

4. The distancing of the creation from the Creator is necessary for the following reasons:

• To give creation (man) an opportunity to be independent. This is accomplished through the complete concealment of the Creator in our world.
• The gradual distancing occurs through the Light’s fulfillment and its subsequent expulsion. These contrasting states create sensations, realizations, and experience in the desire, giving it the opportunity to compare, and thus make it suitable to achieve its intended purpose.

The creation’s purpose is the following: after its forced descent into our world, it is to use its free will and awareness to compare and to choose bestowal over reception. Thus, by choosing that similarity to the Creator is the most important thing, creation must gradually ascend to Him, until reaching full equivalence and adhesion with Him.

5. The degrees, the structure of creation, and all the actions are determined by the nature of the Light and the desire.

Phase 0: Light (the Creator’s attitude to the creature) emanates from the Creator’s plan to create the creature in order to delight it by making it similar to Him (the small state is not considered complete). This phase is called zero or the root. It incorporates the future creature in the form of a point of the future desire, similar to a drop of semen or a seed.

Phase 1: The Light influences the point of desire, developing it to Its own size and then filling it. The desire feels the fulfillment, called the Light of Wisdom (Ohr Hochma). Because the desire is fully dependent on the Light, it doesn’t feel anything besides mere existence, like an embryo within a womb. This phase contains everything that the Creator had allocated for the creature.

Gradually the desire becomes aware of its distinction from the Light and wishes to become like the Light – bestowing. This new desire is defined as a new phase:

Phase 2: This is the desire to bestow to the Creator, to be like the Light. As a result of this, the desire feels a different kind of pleasure than in phase 1 – the pleasure of being similar to the Creator, the Light of Bestowal (Ohr Hassadim). However, gradually the desire realizes that it merely desires to bestow, but does not actually bestow. This realization results in the emergence of a new desire – “to receive for the sake of bestowal,” and this is already defined as phase 3.

Phase 3: The desire receives like in phase 1 (the Light of Hochma) with an intention like in phase 2, and feels that it bestows, like the Creator (the Light of Hassadim). Due to the sensation of being on the Creator’s level, a new desire develops – phase 4:

Phase 4: This is the desire to enjoy the Creator’s status or position by receiving the following from Him:

a) The pleasure of being filled with pleasure, and
b) The pleasure of being similar to Him.

Since the desire receives everything that can possibly emanate from the Creator, phase 4 constitutes a fully developed desire.

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The loneliness a woman feels is a unique natural phenomenon. Its source are the Creator’s words addressed to the woman in the Torah: “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” In what sense will he rule over her? Precisely because a woman will feel drawn toward a family, kids, a husband and a home. There are few women in our world who feel that these desires are fulfilled.

Why did the Creator make these aspirations so deeply rooted, taking up a woman’s entire world? It was done for the purpose of evoking such a connection with her husband that would reveal the Creator between them, as it is written: “Husband and wife, and Shechina (the Creator’s revelation) between them.” It’s in order for the Creator to become revealed to people. Only then will loneliness disappear from the world.

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Relationships

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Two questions I received on Kabbalah as a science:

Question: On one hand it says that Kabbalah only talks about the Upper Worlds, but on the other hand it says that Kabbalah is a science about all of reality. If Kabbalah speaks only about spirituality and not about electrons and other such things, then it would be pointless to hold discussions with scientists, such as Dr. Jeffrey Satinover! After all, Kabbalah talks about the reality that is above matter, before it’s perceived within our senses.

My Answer: Kabbalah talks about the Upper World and the descent of the forces into our world. This is why it is the foundation of the sciences of our world. Recently scientists have begun to understand issues that border the two worlds. When these people – such as Dr. Jeffrey Satinover – receive a positive impression of Kabbalah, they then help us to popularize it.

Question: You are certain that Kabbalah is a science and that a Kabbalist attains it by conducting an inner research of the world. Is it possible that this research is actually the subjective science of a specific individual, who revealed it as a result of a specific path? Would it be correct to say that Kabbalah isn’t a science in and of itself, but only when a person realizes it in practice? What do you think of those who constantly study but don’t advance toward the truth in action? How does Kabbalah regard this?

My Answer: You lack the basic knowledge from the articles: “The Essence of the Wisdom of Kabbalah,” Kabbalah as a Root of All Sciences,” and “Preface to The Book of Zohar”. It’s impossible to explain all of this here. If you really want to know rather than to just negate, you’ll find the answers there.

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A question I received: I’m trying to reconcile the contradiction between the notion of “faith above reason” and your recurring claim that Kabbalah isn’t built on faith, but on sensations and accurate knowledge.

Is the meaning of “faith above reason” that instead of blindly believing something I an told, I take the path that allows me to see for myself whether the things I’m being told are right or wrong?

My Answer: The first man who felt the Creator was Adam (see Baal HaSulam’s article, “The Secret of Attaining the Wisdom” in the book Fruits of Wisdom). The Jewish calendar starts on that day – the first day of the month of Tishrey of the year 0 (5768 years ago).

In the generations following Adam there were others who attained the Creator, but Kabbalah became what it is now only twenty generations later, in Ancient Babylon (4000 years ago). A Babylonian priest named Abraham discovered Kabbalah and described its basic laws in The Book of Creation. He also gathered students and formed the first Kabbalistic group. His followers – his physical and spiritual sons (in those times people were named by the leader of the clan or tribe) continued to develop spiritually. This continued until the people fell from the sensation of the Creator to the sensation of just our world (and as a result, the Second Temple was destroyed 2000 years ago).

After this fall from the sensation of the spiritual world into our world, all of the definitions and names they used before, and their language in general (Hebrew) fell from the spiritual level to the corporeal level. The same words began to signify the things that they started to see, hear and understand. That is to say, the words acquired a corporeal meaning, instead of the things they used to signify in the past. Ever since, the Kabbalistic texts were written with the same letters and words, but everything depends on who reads them – whether it’s someone who’s on the spiritual level like the author, or only on the corporeal level.

“Faith above reason,” for instance, denotes the following condition: the desire (quality) to bestow (Bina, Hafetz Hessed, the Light of Hassadim) is above the desire to receive, called “knowledge,” because in it one receives the Light of Hochma, the Light of Wisdom.

For those who do not perceive the Upper World, the word “faith” means belief in something that may or may not exist, something people only talk about but cannot sense. Kabbalah never talks about this kind of faith, because by definition it engages only in the revelation of the Creator to man in this world! (See Baal HaSulam’s article, “The Essence of the Wisdom of Kabbalah.”)

So if you want to understand the truth, when reading the Kabbalistic texts you must “translate” what you read from the corporeal level to the spiritual level. Then you won’t err like all the religious people who read Kabbalistic texts (the Torah, the Talmud, the prayer book, and so on), interpreting them on the corporeal level. This is actually the source of mankind’s misunderstanding of the Creator.

In the article, “The Secret of Attaining the Wisdom,” Baal HaSulam writes: “The attainment of the whole universe in its absolute depth and interconnections of its parts was revealed in its entirety by Adam.” This is why we call him “The First Man” – because he was the first to achieve the level of “Human” – Adam (in Hebrew), which means “similar to the Creator.”

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Two questions I received on life after the full correction:

Question: If people will rise to the highest spiritual degree, how will we live? What will we eat? Where will we sleep? How will we travel from one place to another? What will be our general form of existence?

My Answer: There are two states:

1. Before the full correction, when our corporeal level of egoism is still not corrected. Hence even though we attain spiritual degrees, we still retain the sensation of this world.

2. After we are fully corrected, when even our corporeal egoism is corrected, we will cease perceiving this world. That’s because it is perceived precisely in this corporeal part of our desire, whereas we will sense ourselves as being fully and exclusively in the World of Infinity – the only true state. All the other states are partial states of its concealment. In Hebrew the word for “concealment” is Olama, and it is the root of the word “world” – Olam. Hence all the concealments of the one existing state of infinity are called worlds.

In the article, “The Future Generation,” Baal HaSulam provides a detailed description of what life will be like before the attainment of the second state above. I have also written a book on this article, called The Last Generation. In addition, there are lessons on it in our online archive.

Question: Did the sons of Israel accept the mutual guarantee after the exodus from Egypt? And what does the exodus from Egypt represent for us?

My Answer: Yes, after their exodus from Egypt the sons of Israel (the group of Kabbalists, students of Abraham) accepted the condition of the “mutual guarantee” – an absolute spiritual bond between them, and the willingness to be as one soul of Adam.

For them as well as for us, this signifies the complete unification into one desire (one soul). However, in our case this is no longer a unification of a portion of the “Babylonians,” but of the whole “Babylon” (all of humankind) in the joint desire of Adam.

For more on this, see the article “The Arvut (Mutual Guarantee).” In it Baal HaSulam writes that the sons of Israel are just a transitional link intended to pass the method of egoism’s correction, Kabbalah, on to all of humankind.

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Two questions I received on worldwide calamities:

Question: I would like to hear a specific forecast of when and how soon will the worldwide hunger begin affecting us? How many days, weeks, or months do we have left?

My Answer: Unfortunately, the upcoming winter in Eastern Europe will already be difficult. Correspondingly, we have to explain to people that positive forces can only be evoked by our equivalence to nature. These forces’ influence will be felt as a quick improvement of the situation.

Question: In a practical sense, what would Kabbalah have advised Jews to do during the Holocaust?

My Answer: As early as 1920 Baal HaSulam organized 300 families to move to Palestine. However, his plans to evacuate all the Jews of Poland were resented by the Orthodox and they exiled him from Warsaw. Hence he left for Palestine alone, and all those who remained were later burned by the Nazis.

All the Kabbalists of that time called on the Jews to flee Europe. But it’s the same as today: No one listens to us! You don’t think that you are in mortal danger today, do you?

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The Book of Zohar. Chapter “Raising a Prayer” – 2 (abridged)

The first Commandment finds its place in the blessings that King David sang during his offerings in the Torah, where man must fear his Master, for these songs stand in a place called “fear” or Malchut. And all of these written blessings constitute the essence of fear of the Creator, Malchut. And man must sing these songs with his desires in fear.

Man must achieve a level of spiritual development where his desires will coincide with what is said in the texts of these blessings. It is impossible to force someone to wish something; all our feelings are the product, the result of our spiritual level. The Light of that degree influences one’s egoism and corrects it with the power of that degree.  Therefore, man can only ask for correction, but it will come from Above, from the Light, from the Creator.

Here we have a list of degrees that man must gradually go through in his correction. These degrees are usually called Commandments, and in all there are 620 of them between us and the Creator: 613 Commandments of the Torah for Israel (altruism) and seven Commandments of the Torah for all the nations (egoism). Here they are expounded in a different way: since the most important thing is to ask for correction (and if the request is genuine, it immediately receives an answer in the form of Light that descends to it), all of man’s work on himself, all of his efforts in the study, all his work and actions are intended only for creating a true request, MAN.

Hence, the stages of man’s spiritual development are described as his path in prayer; as if he stands and prays, although this process continues within him throughout his life on earth.

The second Commandment is to love the Creator. (As it was repeatedly stated, this feeling is the result of correction; see the “Introduction to Talmud Eser Sefirot,” item 45, which describes the four stages of one’s sensation of the governance, from darkness to love). It is when through one’s prayer, one reaches Ahavat Olam (great love) and Le El (for the Creator). These two blessings precede the appeal, Shema Israel (Hear, O Israel) and Ve Ahavta Et (and love the Creator), the blessing of the Creator for one’s love for Him that follows the appeal Shema Israel. And this is the secret of love for the Creator.

The third Commandment takes place when one reaches a place in the prayer that is called Lehishtabe’ach (blessed is the Creator). He must then attain praises and blessings of the Creator in his desire, as in parts of the prayer Yotzer Ohr (He who creates Light) and Yotzer HaMeohrot (maker of the stars).

The fourth Commandment is to proclaim the Creator’s unity, i.e., Shema Israel (Hear, O Israel, our Creator is one!). From this point (degree) on, one must express the secret of the Creator’s unity (in all His manifestations to man) in his heart’s desire (one’s heart must be filled only with the sensation of the One, Upper Force). Afterward, the Commandment to remember and remind others of the exodus from Egypt (egoism) is observed, as it is written: “Remember how you were a slave in Egypt.”

The fifth Commandment is for a Cohen to bless the people (the Light’s descent to the Partzuf), so that Israel will be included when the prayer (the Cohanim’s blessing) ascends, for at this time (state), Knesset Israel (all those who correct themselves by aspiring to the Creator and constitute a part of Malchut de Atzilut), i.e., Malchut, receives a blessing (Light).

The sixth Commandment and the desired time (spiritual state or level when man wishes only to give all of his desires, i.e., his soul, to the Creator, meaning that he can act for the Creator’s sake in all of his desires) is to entrust one’s soul with the Creator with complete desire in one’s heart. When one falls (willingly accepts the small state) on his face (Hochma) and proclaims (raises MAN): “I entrust my soul with You, O Creator.” The intentions and desires of his heart are to give his soul completely to the Creator (this desire is the consequence of this spiritual degree and comes naturally to those who attain it).

These six Commandments of the prayer correspond to the 600 Commandments of the Torah. And the remaining thirteen Commandments are required in order to attract the thirteen properties of mercy (thirteen Midot HaRachamim), which include all the rest. The prayer is adorned with 600 Commandments, which corresponds to HGT NHY, to what the prayer, Malchut, receives from ZA.

Happy is he who heeded and focused his desire on this (who was able to raise a proper request for his correction), who completed all that was required each day (in the Creator’s daylight), and directed his heart’s intentions and desires to fulfill this Commandment, which depends on the word.

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