A question I received: You claim that our souls determine the state of the world, which presumes that we have great wisdom and experience. On the other hand, you say that we are like animals and that there’s nothing left of us after our bodies die. What does that say about our wise soul which determines its future incarnations?

My Answer: The soul is the property of bestowal. If you have acquired this quality through the study of Kabbalah in this life, then you have a soul, and you feel your eternal existence through it. But if you haven’t acquired it, you will have to return to this world to do it.

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A question I received: If we convince the whole world to play a game for one day where everyone will do nothing but bestow, then humanity would feel the flavor of bestowal. Would this action draw enough Light to correct us?

My Answer: Any doctor knows that there is almost no medicine that can cure a person immediately. This can only happen by virtue of a miracle, but not a man-made medicine.

A person could drink a drop of poison and die, or he can use it to create a medicine. It is no coincidence that the symbol of medicine is a snake. It is a known fact that every medicine is poison, but not every poison is medicine. When poison is used as medicine, it is taken in very small dosages and over the course of a long time, until a person is cured. This is the law of correcting the animate body, and the same law holds for correcting the soul.

Why is it that a person can die instantly from taking a drop of poison, but he has to take it for months in order to be cured? This is the consequence of a spiritual process: the breaking of the unified soul into parts. This breaking was carried out from above, and therefore it is instant, whereas the correction, the re-unification, and the cure occurs slowly, depending on us.

Why did the breaking of our souls and the need for correction occur even before we came to this world? It happened so that in the process of our correction we would elucidate the cause, the process and the goal of creation, thereby forming ourselves in similarity to the Creator, the Upper Force of Nature.

And since a person had to reach similarity to the Creator (who is called in Hebrew Bore = Bo – come, and Re – see), this process takes so much time, namely 6000 years, from the first attainment made by Adam, to the last one.

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A question I received: When a person first hears of “Mutual Guarantee” and universal dependency, this kind of talk annoys and repulses him. How do we explain that unification is beneficial?

My Answer: Imagine that this person has been in an accident and is on the verge between life and death. His entire body is broken and he lies lifeless on a stretcher. (This is not so far from the truth, since the shattering of the souls is like an accident.)

If he could feel that the only way for him to come back to life is with the help of his friends, he would no longer hate the idea of a mutual guarantee. He would understand that he doesn’t have a body of his own, but only a point. And his entire body – the arms, legs, brain and everything else – is something he can only get from others. He will only get these body parts if the others will sacrifice theirs for him.

This is a mutual guarantee. It is when in addition to the single point you start out with, everything else that you receive comes exclusively from your connection with others. This is because the desire to receive does not exist in the spiritual world; only the desire to bestow exists there. Therefore, one does not live at the expense of oneself, but at the expense of the sacrifices made by all of humanity. They constitute your body.

You are only a point, whereas humanity is the body of your soul. All these people must provide you with the organs you need. If you will love them, and if they will be connected with one another, then the force of the mutual guarantee will bestow all that is necessary to every one of us.

It’s good that people today are already beginning to understand that they do not want to be in a mutual guarantee with others. However, once they will learn that they cannot survive on their own, people will desire the mutual guarantee. And then they will realize that they do not have the strength to attain it by themselves. They will passionately desire for the law of Mutual Guarantee to govern them, but will only discover that they are unable to attain it or practice it.

That is when they will cry out so loudly that they will receive this quality from above. And from that moment on, they will become the Creator’s slaves rather than the Pharaoh’s slaves. This will happen by virtue of their desire to have another power, a different authority, rule over them. This authority is the force of bestowal, instead of their innate egoism.

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Questions I received on observing religious practices:

Question: I practice Torah and the Mitzvot (commandments) in my daily life and my practice often becomes mechanical – not spiritual. You state that Kabbalah has nothing to do with religion, yet it seems inextricably linked to Torah.

Please advise me on how I can re-engage with the Mitzvot in a way that will correct my “desire to receive” to a “desire to give.” Surely that is what they are for. Please shed some light on the connection of the Mitzvot to Kabbalah, and the significance of the Mitzvot for a Jew.

My Answer: Kabbalah is the method of the soul’s correction by means of revealing the Creator. The soul bears no relation to the body.

If you want to follow the tenets of Judaism, it’s your business. Personally, I abide by this framework because it is the tradition of the nation I belong to. However, I have hundreds of thousands of students who are not Jews and who do not follow these commandments. This does not impair their spiritual development in any way. It is written: “They will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them,” and “My house will be called a house of prayer for all the peoples.” This means that everyone will unite by revealing the Creator.

Kabbalah was revealed in Ancient Babylon to everyone, and today it is being revealed to everyone again. Regardless, every person can practice his own external cultural traditions.

Question: How can we observe 613 commandments if we are not Jews? Where can we find the list of these commandments? How do I observe Shabbat and holidays: should I go to a synagogue or a Kabbalah center that observe such events?

My Answer: The 613 commandments are the correction of 613 desires. These desire will only be revealed inside you after you cross Machsom. They are not related to any actions in our world – they are desires.

Religious actions, however, are traditions and do not correct a person or his soul. It’s not necessary to observe them in order to attain the goal of creation. They are there for you in case you want to be connected to the culture of your people.

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A question I received: You don’t have to make any effort to love sushi or your child. So why is it that in order to love one’s neighbor, one has to go through such a difficult, intricate and lengthy process?

My Answer: When we are satisfying our egoistic desires, we act instinctively: we love ourselves and everything that is ours, and we dislike everything that is foreign, sensing that it is distant from us and does not belong to us. This feeling of the difference between “mine” and “the rest” was created in us in order for us to realize that we are opposite to the whole world and to the Creator. The revelation of this fact is called the revelation of the “shattered common soul.”

If the Creator was clearly revealed to a person, the person would be deprived of his freedom of choice, of any free desire, thought, and action. He would be completely annulled before the Creator. Therefore, in order for man to attain similarity to the Creator, who is the quality of bestowal, one must start out in a state where the Creator is concealed from the person. However, one then needs another example or model of the quality of bestowal and love, instead of the Creator.

In order to create this opportunity for us to attain similarity to the Creator while He is hidden, the single soul of Adam HaRishon broke into individual souls. As a result of this breaking, each soul now imagines itself to be outside of the others, and feels repelled from them by its egoism. And when a soul corrects its egoism – its separation from other souls, it attains the quality of bestowal and similarity to the Creator. This is the goal of creation.

Therefore, we should not seek to correct any of our actions, but only our attitudes toward others. It is written, “One goes from love for the neighbor to love for the Creator.” This is how we correct our soul, become similar to the Creator, and attain the goal of creation. Therefore, “love your neighbor as yourself” is the general law of the world (the Torah), and the other laws are particular expressions of this law.

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We have to understand the roots of the things taking place. These roots are described in the books of Kabbalah. Those who wrote these books, the Kabbalists, were not bounded by the limitations of the terrestrial globe. Rather, Kabbalists see the souls and the connections between them. The changes in these connections determine our lives, individually and together.

The Kabbalists wish to tell us about what is happening to our souls, at the roots of everything. They have nothing to say about our world, since our world is the world of actions, while all the decisions descend to it from the world of souls. Kabbalists use the “language of branches” to explain the happenings in the world of souls, but we usually do not understand them. In order to understand, one must exist in both worlds at once, just as they do.

Therefore, if we wish to understand their words and to learn about the forces that influence us, the forces that control all the events in our world, we have to rise to the level of these forces – the level where the decisions are made. We have to shift our focus from the game that is occurring in our world, and instead try to see the inner force, the Hand that acts within every person, animal, or plant. It doesn’t matter what object or event you are looking at, as the most important thing is the inner force.

This is the only thing of importance. Whatever happens to the bodies in this world is of no importance. The main question is: what happens to the souls, which determine everything that happens to the bodies – their obedient puppets?

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A question I received: If people learn to live in our world according to the law, “love your neighbor as yourself” and will defeat their egoism, then what will our world look like? After all, corrected souls do not return to this world.

My Answer: The entire corrected humanity will rise as one whole to the state of the World of Infinity.

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A question I received: If love of others is a law, then how can anyone possibly fail to abide by it?

My Answer: A while back I knew a person who didn’t consider radiation a serious health hazard and believed that vodka would cleanse the body of it. So, he exposed himself to radiation a few times, and died soon after. The point is that there are forces in Nature that man doesn’t perceive, but they still affect him.

The science of Kabbalah reveals the whole of reality to man, including all of its laws, which invariably operate and cannot be escaped. We always exist in the same world, under the influence of the same laws, but we reveal them gradually. If we weren’t revealing certain laws now, it would be easy to ignore them and say that we’re doing ok.

Today we are revealing the Upper, Spiritual layer of reality – the unity between the souls and the place where the breaking of the souls occurred. Of course, we are free to ignore this, to pretend that nothing’s happening. But once we run out of food and are afflicted with all kinds of other miseries, people will quickly see that there is no choice but to recognize these things.

The Creator is a universal, active law – the general law of reality, and humanity must discover it. All the parts of humanity are completely interconnected, similar to the human body, where every part cares for every other part. This is the true meaning of love. People’s customary understanding of love is the pleasure that comes from fulfilling oneself, whereas true love is pleasure that’s felt from caring for others’ fulfillment. This is the meaning of being global.

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What is the cause of the new situation we are in? Why is the connection between us being revealed? It is to reveal the connection between our souls. This net that binds people together is spiritual, and it is called Adam HaRishon, the common soul.

We are “caught” in it like fish in a net – this is how we feel because we do not desire this connection! However, if you will desire to be connected to everyone else by this net, it will become a pleasure for you. Why? Because through this mutual connection, you will attain the Upper Force and spiritual life.

You are already inside this net – it is Nature itself. And the financial crisis, as well as all the other crises that are happening in different areas, are there for us to become aware of the net we are in.

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A question I received: Can a person who isn’t Jewish acquire a soul? According to Kabbalists like Rabbi Hiya, the soul (Neshama) can only be acquired by a person who observes the Torah.

My Answer: Of course, Rabbi Hiya is right. Every person who aspires to the Creator is called Israel. Every person who corrects his egoism according to the condition, “I created egoism and the Torah for its correction,” is considered a person who observes the Torah and the 613 commandments (he corrects the 613 desires of the soul). He then receives the Upper Light, the revelation of the Creator, inside his corrected desires, called the soul.

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