A question I received: In a previous post, you gave a lengthy response in defense of yourself. Dear Rav, I think it’s a waste of your precious time to do this. Those who understand what you have attained truly appreciate your merit and exclusivity. As for your opponents, even though they get on your nerves, they are actually doing a service to dissemination by bringing attention to you and Kabbalah. Still, your devotees (myself being one of them) are offended by the fact that our Teacher has to come down to the level of such ignorant people in order to defend himself and to flatter the remains of his egoism. Besides, we have to love them too.

My Answer: On 08-05-08 and 08-06-08 we studied Baal HaSulam’s letters and his attitude to opponents of Kabbalah. It would benefit you to watch these lessons. Nowhere does it say that we have to love impurity (Klipot), which is prolonging our suffering in the egoistic exile. However, we do have to try to correct these people and explain to others about the harm that they bring onto everyone. This is what motivated me to write about the connection between them, me and Kabbalah.

Therefore, it isn’t a defense of myself, but study material. In addition, it isn’t written about me, because Kabbalists don’t talk about themselves from a personal standpoint. Moreover, you shouldn’t believe my answers but verify everything for yourself!

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Two questions I received on whether it would be best for the world’s spiritual leaders to unite:

Question: If we were to gather all the people of truth in one place and tune into the general system, would we be able to influence the afterworld with our Light or information, as well as the development of our planet?

My Answer: We have to disseminate Kabbalah to all the people in the world, accept the world as a whole, and provide every person with everything they need for correction no matter where they are located. All the people in the world are sick with the same illness – egoism, which separates them from the Light of life. Hence, everyone needs the medication – the Upper Light. This is what we believe, and this is why we disseminate Kabbalah to everyone. After that, it’s up to the person to take the medicine now, or later on – when he will feel his illness at a more advanced stage.

Instead of gathering in one place, people have to gather in one intention, in spite of the physical distance separating them. This is the purpose of our world. Nevertheless, when someone wants to move to Israel to join our group, we don’t turn them away, and about 5-10 people move here every year. However, I don’t consider this necessary for spiritual advancement. There have also been cases when people moved here and found it to be too intense for them, and had to return to their previous location.

Question: Do the world’s spiritual leaders, such as Rav Laitman and the Dalai Lama, as well as their students, have a spiritual connection and do they help each other (I don’t mean the World Wisdom Council)? I get the impression that spirituality is just a game, where each person (or group) is for himself. Sooner or later people get tired of these games, because you start feeling like you’re the soccer ball and you don’t want to play for any team. If the spiritual leaders have a connection with each other, then why isn’t it revealed to us, the masses, in a material form and with a true final goal (again, I don’t mean the World Wisdom Council)?

My Answer: I don’t associate myself with any organization, including the World Wisdom Council, and I have no connection with any spiritual leaders. I only participate wherever I see an opportunity to disseminate Kabbalah. Kabbalah is so vastly different from other methods at the root, that we cannot unite or work together with any earthly method or religion.

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Questions I received on whether one should visit the graves of the righteous, and what to ask for at these sites:

Question: I want to visit the graves of the righteous on Mount Miron. The trip I’m interested in going on will be held at night, and the trip’s organizer said that according to Kabbalah, you can use the moon’s cycle to calculate what is the best time to ask to be cured from illness. However, I also heard another opinion from someone who studies Kabbalah – he said that this shouldn’t be done. I would like to find out whether it can be done, and why at night?

My Answer: No one ever visits graves at night. The one exception is the night of Lag BaOmer, when people light bonfires all over Israel, including Mount Miron, by the grave of Rashbi, the author of The Book of Zohar. This is an ancient custom. However, asking to be cured from illness when there is a full moon has nothing to do with Kabbalah, but only with mysticism and shamanism.

Rabash and I used to go to Tiberius for two days out of the week, and sometimes we visited the grave of Rashbi on Mount Miron. Rabash respected that place. However, he didn’t see it as a place to ask for people’s corporeal, egoistic problems to be solved, such as healing, but rather only as a place to ask for similarity to the Creator. When one is there, he should ask for the ability to love his neighbor, instead of being concerned with one’s animate body, with healing it, or other benefits.

By definition, Kabbalah is the method of revealing the Creator (the property of love and bestowal) to a person in this world (in this life). Kabbalah bears no relation to receiving something for oneself. (See the definition in the article “The Essence of the Wisdom of Kabbalah.”)

Between the years 1979 and 1991, when I knew Rabash, he visited the Wailing Wall only once – in 1983. He just walked past the wall, at least 2-3 meters away from it, and didn’t even come close to it, not to mention touching it. He visited the grave of the Ari once in ten years.

Baal HaSulam once said that he really doesn’t care where they’ll bury the bag with his bones. When he passed away and his students didn’t know where to bury him, one student remembered that Baal HaSulam used to like walking on a specific hill, and that’s where they buried him.

Once I asked Rabash for permission to fix up Baal HaSulam’s grave – to whiten it, make a place for candles, and so on. Rabash told me to leave this to others, because there were more important things to do.  Rabash also didn’t prepare a burial place for himself, even though it’s a custom among the religious. (In the past bodies weren’t buried, but locked in a cave that was dug for this purpose. They were left there for some time, and when only the bones remained, they were placed into a vessel.)

Kabbalists do not respect anything corporeal. Every person respects what is important to him, and what he is attached to – the body or the soul. To a Kabbalist, the body is intended to do work, just like an animal (for example, cattle). All his attention is focused on developing the soul – the part of the Creator in man, the property of love and bestowal.

Question: Rashbi is buried on Mount Miron, and thousands of people visit his grave every year. Is this something the Creator instructed them to do, or do these instructions come from religious leaders who want to influence people and have power over them?

My Answer: Kabbalah favors this custom, because it brings people closer to Kabbalah, making them respect it and become interested in it.

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In our world, pain is the organism’s reaction to a problem in it. It’s the organism’s way of telling us that something is wrong with our body. For example, pain warns us of danger and makes us pull our hand away from fire. Pain compels us to move, to come closer to something/someone, or to get away from them, to change our qualities, to adopt new opinions, to realize the reason for the pain, to draw conclusions, and to progress to new states of being.

In fact, pain is the only force that is able to affect our egoism: pain when we feel bad, or when others feel bad, or when others feel good. Pain pushes us from behind and forces us to develop. The pain of feeling empty pushes us ahead, toward fulfillment. Pain is everywhere! All our sensations come from clashes, contact, pressure – or in other words, from pain. We feel pleasure only when it’s preceded by the painful sensation of an unfulfilled desire, suffering, or expectation.

However, when we come out of egoism and rise above the Machsom, we begin to realize that instead of living our lives based on lack or absence, we can live based on total fulfillment and fullness. Instead of basing everything on pain, we can take perfection as our starting point. Instead of doing the things we do because we need to, we can do them out of love, without needing anything.

This is a completely different kind of existence, a different attitude to the world, to people, to yourself, and of course – to the Creator. And when we attain it, the Creator immediately becomes revealed to us, because then we become perfect, just like Him.

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Two questions I received about the mysterious fate of holy books

Question: All the holy books, which have nothing to do with the physical world, were for ages used as a design for living and culture, and sadly caused more suffering than enlightenment. Was this an error?

My Answer: This was necessary in order to mix the properties of egoism with the properties of the Creator that were corrupted in us, so that later, once these two opposite properties are intermixed, we would be able to correct ourselves by evoking the Light of Correction (Ohr Makif). Errors only happen in our understanding of what’s happening, but not in what’s actually happening!

Question: Why was The Book of Zohar written and then concealed for many years? Why did it come into this world so early, if people didn’t need it then?

My Answer: It was written at a time when “light” souls appeared in our world, at the beginning of the exile from the spiritual level, on the 125th level of attainment. But it is being used now, at the end of the exile from the spiritual world, starting with the lowest level (level zero), by people who already understand that there is no other way to go. And The Book of Zohar itself speaks about this.

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Questions I received on accelerating one’s spiritual path and realizing one’s Reshimo

Question: What’s the purpose of us participating in acceleration?

My Answer: By accelerating, we change ourselves, and this is the result we need, rather than the acceleration itself. And we can only attain this result by accelerating our movement through applying our personal, free desire, which we acquired through interacting with others.

Question: How can there be freedom of will in acceleration?

My Answer: It exists due to the freedom of will one has in interacting with others and in receiving additional desires and aspirations toward the goal from them. One’s freedom of will lies in using the environment.

Question: There is no time, but even if time did exist, the Creator and the goal of creation wouldn’t be limited by the parameters of time, right?

My Answer: Yes, and we have to enter this timeless space of sensations precisely by using our freedom of will.

Question: It’s a blessing to go through 1,000 states in two minutes. But what about going through 1,000 states in a day – is this worse? I know that there are Reshimot, which are predetermined, but does the speed of their unraveling depend on the power of the Surrounding Light’s (Ohr Makif‘s) influence?

My Answer: Yes, it only depends on this. Of course, even without it we would still be forced to develop our aspiration for the goal through the group, but by means of suffering and a lengthy path. But we can also go through this development quickly and with pleasure, by realizing that it’s necessary, with the help of the forces that we receive from the environment instead of the compulsory forces, as Baal HaSulam writes in the article “The Freedom.”

Question: Does the way a person realize his Reshimo depend on the environment he’s in?

My Answer: It depends on how he uses his environment. If a person finds out about the opportunity to advance through freedom of will, this means that the proper environment for doing so has been prepared for him as well: a teacher, books, and the group.

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A question I received: If the Creator is good and does good, there is a plan of creation, and everything is predetermined, then how do you explain suicide? What kind of correction should a soul perform in a body, if we don’t have freedom of choice and one’s suicide was predetermined in advance, from the root, since we are controlled by our root?

My Answer: Everything that has already happened was the Creator’s will. But as long as it hasn’t happened yet, it is up to a person. There is freedom of choice, otherwise we would be robots and there would be nothing to discuss – we would just have to exist! You have to understand the connection between the general governance and the private governance, HaVaYaH and Elokim. For more on this, see Baal HaSulam’s Letter from p. 61 – “If I Don’t Do It for Myself, Who Will Help Me?”

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A question I received: The state of Israel has fallen into a depression. The newspaper Yediot Ahronot stated that “According to data received from hospitals, there has been a 23% increase in the use of antidepressants and medicines against fear.” Are you in favor of using these medications?

My Answer: If a person is afflicted by depression or fear, or any other kind of illness, he should treat it through any means possible, and once it stops controlling him, he should start studying Kabbalah, because one way or another, there is and will never be any other medication. It’s written: “It [Kabbalah] will cure any affliction.”

It’s because the only thing that was created is desire. And then it received an intention – to use the desire either “for one’s own sake” or “for the sake of something outside of oneself” (for the sake of another, one’s neighbor, or the Creator). When the intention is “for the sake of another,” it makes the desire similar to the Creator – bestowing. And then, according to the law of equivalence, this desire becomes a vessel for the Upper Light, health, goodness, vigor, and eternal life!

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News Story (translated from Cursorinfo.co.il): Israel is a unique nation trying to survive a deadly battle. It’s a nation that worships life at a time when it’s surrounded by enemies that worship death. And it has to solve a two-sided dilemma: How to use the advantages of the “society of life” in the battle with the “society of death”?

A mandatory condition in this battle is a tacit social contract according to which every Israeli pledges to risk his life whenever necessary, under the condition that the other citizens will do the same. The spirit of this tacit contract is that we all agree to place our lives in danger for the sake of our mutual survival.

For Israel, breaching this social agreement is much more dangerous than HAMAS and Hezbollah, Syria and Iran. Breaching this unwritten document leads to a situation where less and less young citizens want to become soldiers who protect the country and risk their lives doing so. As a result, the country’s leaders also have less and less moral right to send people into the heat of battle. Less and less Israelis feel protected, and it’s not because the enemy has gotten stronger, but because the social contract is disappearing from our life.

My Comment: And its only solution is in the mutual guarantee of helping one another survive. Then, in such a connection, we will discover a special fulfillment – the perception of the Upper Governing Force. We will understand that everything was created for the sole purpose of revealing this force to us. When we connect to it, we will feel that we exist eternally and perfectly. However, we can go through this path by means of the Light instead of suffering. See Baal HaSulam’s articles “The Arvut” (“Mutual Guarantee”), “The Essence of the Wisdom of Kabbalah” and “The Freedom.”

Following Israel, the whole world will feel that it is in the same situation – that its existence is endangered. And whether by the path of suffering or by the path of revealing Kabbalah, it will have to come to the Light.

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A question I received: Wasn’t it proved that the books of Joseph Flavius are false? A lot has been written about this.

My Answer: I don’t believe anything or anyone. Every researcher is first and foremost an egoist, wanting to “discover” something in order to get famous and to prove that he’s worth something, at least to himself! I wouldn’t base my life on any sources except authentic Kabbalistic ones. So it doesn’t really matter whether they are correct. All the books, other than those written from the attainment of the Upper Worlds, might as well disappear. What do we need them for? The only use we have for them is to verify, through the path of suffering, that the only science is the attainment of the Upper Governing Force.

I understand that my words might be confusing, but any act one makes that isn’t aimed at the root of one’s soul, even the most beautiful and aesthetic act, made “with the best intentions” etc., only causes suffering in the world. And even with books written from the attainment of the Upper Worlds – we still need to select those that lead us to the goal in the shortest and most direct way. Read Kabbalists’ advice about this (below).

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