A question I received: In a few days we will be getting together for an international virtual Kabbalah Congress, where we will try to feel the desire of all the millions of people that aspire to attain spirituality. But how is it possible to feel the pain of others from lack of spirituality if we are incapable of even sharing another person’s material pain?

My Answer: We will try to achieve this together. Each of us feels a slight pain caused by the desire for spirituality, but it is constantly subdued by the fact that our desire to receive pleasure is perpetually growing.

The solution is that we need to increase our desire for unity rather than our desire for spirituality. Although it is the same thing, our egoism presents spirituality as a personal acquisition, while unity is presented as a corporeal action.

Question cont’d: Is this how we return to the state in which we existed as one soul, the World of Infinity?

My Answer: Yes, we can reach that state only by uniting with each other. However, it has to be a unification of souls rather than of bodies or corporeal goals.

Question cont’d: But we are incapable of achieving this state.

My Answer: We only need to ask for it, to raise MAN for the Light to give us the force of unification.

On one hand, we all need to reveal the egoism in us, our mutual aversion and indifference to one another. However, on the other hand, we have to understand that only the Light can correct all of this, and to cry out to it to correct us.

Question cont’d: But I don’t even have a desire to correct myself.

My Answer: This is why it is called “a prayer that precedes the prayer,” or a desire that precedes the desire. We begin with simple things: let’s dance, sing, and do everything together. Consequently, these simple, primitive, physical actions of our world will give us a taste of unity. They will awaken our material heart more and more until we reach the highest degree of spirituality.

There is a story about a Kabbalist who use to pay street musicians (Klezmers) to play for him. He would listen to their music and be inspired by spirituality. His wife scolded him: “There is nothing to eat in the house, and you are giving our last pennies to these drunkards! They’ll just drink it all away!”

However, he replied, “That’s irrelevant. I cannot live without their music. They could be drunkards who don’t understand anything else, but I need to awaken myself now and I cannot come out of this state on my own.”

This is a story about a great Kabbalist who would give his last money to street musicians just to hear them play a little. Otherwise, he was unable to continue his corrections.

And now we will do the same thing.

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I connect the points in the heart wishing to create a Kabbalistic group out of them, or the unification of the souls of Isra-el (“directly to the Creator”). Meanwhile, besides the point in the heart, each person also has a part of the egoistic desire. We are willing to cancel this ego of ours in order to unite. And to the extent that we unite in this common desire, according to its quality of unity and mutual guarantee, we feel the Upper Light, the Creator, the quality of bestowal, which governs within us.

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I am told that everything exists within me, including all people and the whole of reality. However, on the other hand I am told that I need to unite with other souls which exist somewhere outside of me. There is obviously some duality by which we are currently challenged. However, by reading and trying to permeate The Book of Zohar, it will fix everything and resolve this inner confusion we have.

As we strive to reveal our soul and to imagine that the whole world is within it, we begin to understand the need for a connection between souls. Therefore, we start to search for people like us who also aspire to the spiritual goal. We then try to create a system of connection between us where we will reveal the Creator. And when spirituality is finally revealed to us, even in its very first degree, we begin to understand how we are each connected to the other.

Right now, we perceive reality only from one side, which is worthless and false. We cannot imagine the second side or the connections between the two sides. Therefore, the more we study, the more confused we become, but this is good because it is the path to understanding. We need to get confused in order to later understand. From a lack of correction, we come to correction.

For the time being, we need to imagine that the studies develop an individual soul in each person, and in our practical work with each other, we are trying to unite the points in the heart for the sake of one goal: the revelation of the Creator. Along with the point in the heart, each person has his own part of egoism, but we cancel it for the sake of reaching the spiritual goal.

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The wider I reach out to collect all parts of the broken common soul into a single unified whole, the stronger the force that I acquire which enables me to attain the system that The Zohar describes. It tells us how to attain unity and to build our common spiritual body out of all souls and desires. When all those separate and contradictory desires unite together, they form a new, living system of life because despite their differences, they start working in harmony for the sake of achieving one goal. This is when they attain spiritual life.

Each one works in opposition to others – one moves this way, the other moves that way. It’s just like an orchestra where each violin player moves his bow in a different direction and each drummer hits the drums with the sticks moving up and down at different times, but the whole orchestra performs in harmony.

We have to understand that we can attain spirituality only by connecting different, opposite parts for the sake of reaching one ultimate goal, the Creator. When they connect for the sake of this goal, they thereby attain spiritual life.

It turns out that everyone has their own place and a right to exist; all we need is correction!

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Each desire consists of two parts: the Upper and the lower, Galgalta ve Eynaim, which is connected to the Upper Partzuf and the AHP, which is connected to the lower. This is the way that all the souls are connected in the spiritual world, where they are dependent upon each other.

It turns out that with my bestowing part (Galgalta ve Eynaim), I am fully under the control of the Upper Level and I wish to belong to it. Meanwhile, with my lower part (AHP), I am completely connected to the lower one and I care for it.

I bestow in both cases. However, with regard to the Upper One, I bestow by canceling myself, whereas with regard to the lower one, I bestow by caring for it. The more I am able to cancel myself before the Upper One and to receive from it, the more I can give to the lower one later.

This is what happens between all the souls, and therefore, everything depends on our mutual connection. It turns out that a person has nothing left to call his own, since his Upper Part is determined by the Upper Level, and his lower part is determined by the lower one. If he is united with both the Upper One and the lower one, then he fully belongs to them, and now he can reveal his “I” precisely in this form. Then his point in the heart picks up strength and flourishes as it realizes itself.

This is like the mother of a family for whom the most important thing is the upper level, her husband, and the lower level, her children. She does not see her existence separate from them and for this reason she is the most important member of the family; it is she who holds everything together.

It is the same for every soul; by receiving Light from Above and transferring it below, it becomes important to everyone.

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Sometimes The Zohar talks about things that I already know from studying the structure of my soul, such as the left or right sides, Hassadim, Hochma, Cohen, Levi, three lines, Bina, Zeir Anpin, Malchut. This system is already clear to me and I visualize it as a picture, a chart, or a drawing; and I try to recognize it from within.

To do so, I have to find some emotional feedback within me. Each word and definition, such as “right,” “left,” “Cohen,” “Levi,” and “David” has to be connected to a certain sensation. When we don’t experience any sensations, we should at least imagine them as a certain scheme. When I read about Chesed, Gevura, Tifferet, Cohen, Levi, Israel, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Netzhah, Hod, Yesod, Malchut, the assembly of the souls of Israel, and so forth, I have to imagine how these properties relate to each other within my inner space.

At first I visualize them in the form of a scheme showing how these desires and properties exist within me. As I imagine this system in this form, I have to find an adequate sensation to each word and observe how my body, my feelings, and my general desire react to each word in The Book of Zohar.

The same applies in our world: When we hear a familiar word, we immediately react to it. After all, we are a desire; we are ruled by our sensations, not our intellect. Therefore, behind the picture that becomes clear to me to varying degrees, I have to find an inner, emotional reaction to every word.

Everything described in The Book of Zohar is hidden from me and totally tasteless, but by trying to find sensations behind these words, I reach a demand for their revelation.

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Why is it written that The Book of Zohar exudes Light and contains a special force? We know that the book itself does not contain any special power – it’s just paper. However, when a person attains the Creator through his desire, he paves the trail from this world through all the worlds, and his soul ascends up that trail to the World of Infinity.

As a person ascends up this trail, he establishes a connection with all the souls, similar to how in our world every organ is connected to all the others. A great Kabbalist is a great soul that wrote manuscripts and left them to us, and we now use them to receive the force of life and the Upper Light.

But why do we receive the Upper Light precisely through these books? It’s because a Kabbalist’s manuscript is his spiritual expression in relation to us, which helps us connect to him. It is a means of connecting with his soul.

Having paved the trail to the spiritual world and established a connection with all the other souls, a Kabbalist then left all of this for the whole world to use. Therefore, when we receive a book from a Kabbalist, we connect to his soul and to the connecting net that he created in the general system of souls. This, in turn, helps us connect with that great Kabbalist and take our own small steps with him by our side.

The Book of Zohar was written by ten great Kabbalists who correspond to the ten fundamental Sefirot, the primordial HaVaYaH. Therefore, they did not just pave a thin trail, but a wide, wonderful, and short path that allows anyone to receive the same forces as they had (to “fuel up” for the path) and ascend.

This is why The Book of Zohar is so special: It is not a book, but a spiritual system that enables us to establish a connection with the goal and provides us with everything we need to attain it. While reading The Zohar, we connect to this system, work with it, and it works with us. We must only desire to connect to it, to understand it, and to belong to it. If we have this desire, then the great souls of the Kabbalists have already prepared everything else that we need. They are able to lift us up, help us, and keep raising us higher and higher.

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In the “Preface to the Book of Zohar,” Baal HaSulam writes that although it seems to me that everything takes place externally, before my eyes, any reasonable person knows that all these pictures exist only within the brain. When I realize this, I am ready to begin to approach the matters spoken of by the science of Kabbalah.

The lack of this realization is the reason why The Book of Zohar is concealed from us and why we don’t know how to open and read it. It’s because the key to understanding it lies in having the correct perception of reality. The Book of Zohar must be approached only by imagining the depictions within myself. The terminology, sounds, worlds, spiritual objects, souls, and relationships are all notions within me. This is particularly true when addressing the parameters of reality’s perception: world, year, and soul – all of which are above time, space, and motion.

If I perceive the text as an unfolding pattern of relationships between forces and qualities within me, I will gradually reveal increasingly deeper inner states. Then it will become clear that this external reality isn’t truly real, even if it seems real to me. I only see it as existing outside and independent of me.

It is my present folly in thinking that I do not create this reality, mistakenly thinking that it unfolds before me by itself, having existed before my birth and sure to exist after my death. I have to try to change all these beliefs in order to start to understand what The Zohar wants to explain to me.

The key and the entrance to The Book of Zohar lies precisely in transporting everything inside myself, as per the principle, “A person is the whole world.” I can tell whether or not my study is correct by checking: How much do I expect to feel and reveal my entire future within myself?

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Why do I feel some Kelim as inner (myself, Galgalta Eynaim) and others as outer (the entire universe other than myself, AHP)? It is because I do not have a screen on the outer Kelim of AHP, and therefore I cannot correct these levels of desire.

I can build a screen with the intention to bestow over the “root, soul, and body,” meaning Galgalta Eynaim. Then I will feel these Kelim as my own, as they are the true Kelim of bestowal. But with the Kelim of reception, I can only attain incomplete love and bestowal.

It follows that the result of the second restriction is Malchut’s ascent to Bina. Until Bina I am filled with the Creator’s Kelim, and therefore everything joins together there: the root, the soul, and the body. I feel that I exist there because I can be clothed by Bina. Otherwise I wouldn’t even feel that I exist.

However, wherever Bina cannot clothe the “garments and palaces” (AHP), my ego reigns there instead. This explains my egoistic attitude toward the world and the hatred that exists between people.

By understanding how this system works, one acquires an instrument, a lever that enables him to change.

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Within each of us there is a desire which broke. Therefore we perceive part of our desire as our self, which in Kabbalah is described as “the root, the soul, and the body,” and the other part of our desire as being outside of us. That which is closer to us is referred to as “clothing” and farther away from us is called “castle,” or the outside space. However, in reality it all belongs to us and exists in our feelings; we merely imagine that something exists outside of our desire.

There is great difference between the inner and the outer desire. The barrier that separates them is called the Parsa, the force of the breaking. It is as though we receive anesthesia on one part of the desire and stop feeling that it is ours. Imagine you’ve just been injected with anesthesia and your leg is being removed. At the same time you are talking to people, laughing, and don’t feel a thing; you continue to live your life!

However, our situation regarding our “external desire” is even more extreme. Besides feeling that this desire is not ours, we were also instilled with the sensation that it is opposite and even hostile to us. We feel it is less important than us and can only think about how to use and exploit it.

Moreover, this is the only reason we notice it at all. Billions of other manifestations of the same desire exist in the world, but if we don’t find a way to use them for our own benefit, then we won’t notice them at all.

The force of the breaking makes us feel pleasure from killing, burning, exploiting, and enslaving this desire of ours. It fools us so completely that we cause harm to ourselves and don’t even understand we are doing it!

Harming others in all possible ways eventually reveals the harm we cause ourselves. Just imagine the disappointment and pain we have yet to feel.

So how do we cure this deceptive blindness in ourselves? This is why we read The Book of Zohar and want it to help us. We want its force to affect us and give us back the part that we’ve lost in order to correct it.

We want to see that this foreign desire (other people) is actually ours, by correcting the force of the breaking and uniting all five parts of our desire. Then nothing will remain outside forcing us to think that it is not part of us.

When we cure our blindness so that our eyes open, we feel that it’s all us – the vessel of our soul. Everything exists inside us, including the Upper Light and the Creator.

By eliminating this gap and division, we unite the Light and the Kli into one.

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