We are now beginning to study The Book of Zohar, so let us speak about how to go about the study. You don’t have to read the text. It’s enough to just listen to it and to let everything being said go through you. Let it happen inside you while you aspire to feel the picture that The Zohar is depicting for you.

Maybe you won’t understand any of what The Zohar is telling you, as if it’s talking to you in a foreign language. Still, your greatest desire should be to know what it is talking about. And indeed, it is telling you about you and your life there, in the Upper World! By aspiring to imagine your existence in this other world with the help of this incomprehensible text, it will simply happen. Out of nothingness, total emptiness and numbness, new sensations will start awakening inside you. These will be your reactions to the words of this book.

The Zohar is written on two levels or in two languages. One language describes certain events using images of your world, the world familiar to you. Meanwhile, the other language that speaks parallel to it leads you into spiritual concepts. You are being shown two worlds that are parallel to one another. However, these are only two levels of perception that exist relative to you. In reality, there is just one perception and one picture, which you divide in two for now.

In order to enter the new world, you have to imagine and feel that additional, spiritual level of perception which is being described. These two levels have to exist inside you one parallel to another. Meanwhile, you have to aspire to ascend from the material description to the spiritual one.

The teacher does not have to explain anything. The student has to consume the text and open up all the “entrances” in order to let the text flow through him freely, like an expansive, tranquil stream of water. You should be expecting and waiting for the new sensations and picture to form in your perception.

You shouldn’t envision any physical images or actions. The text of The Book of Zohar is a journey deep into the soul, and its words have to elicit direct sensations of what is happening inside you, inside your qualities and forces, and eventually, your relationship with the Creator. This has to take place in the deepest place inside of you.

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All of our perception is based on a comparison of what we perceive now with what we perceived in the past. When we are born, our parents and relatives give us various models of perception and according to these models, we are later able to recognize the world and everything existing in it.

These models stay in our memory and enable us to tell what different pictures of reality are similar to and what they may be. In this way, whenever we encounter something new, we compare it to everything that is already stored in our memory.

So how then can we perceive spirituality if we don’t have the inner models for it? Spirituality is in front of us even now, but we don’t feel or perceive it because we have nothing to compare it to. Perhaps it is going through us and passing through all our senses, but we don’t recognize it because our memory does not hold the appropriate models or images. We have nothing to compare it to and therefore we cannot identify it.

When we read The Book of Zohar, it starts to influence us; its text shows us inner spiritual images or models. We don’t see the spiritual world yet, but we begin to understand what different spiritual qualities are like, what is above and what is below, what is inside and outside, what is weaker or stronger, what is red and what is white, and what is a quality such as Hesed.

The Book of Zohar starts lifting us up with these models, similar to how we lift up children. This enables us to understand the spiritual picture and divide it into familiar elements.

We then see something very interesting: we were seeing this picture before as well, but we did not recognize anything in it. And that is simply amazing! Spirituality was right here, but we could not perceive it because we did not have the inner models for it.

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A question I received: Why is it so important to read Kabbalah books?

My Answer: Information comes in many forms. In our times, people are gradually shifting from reading to listening to audio files, and from listening to watching videos. But these are not the same thing.

Watching and listening to something happens on the animate level, but reading happens on the human level. This is completely different. Through reading a book, a person connects to a spiritual channel.

It’s great if you watch or listen to the lessons, but nothing can replace a book because it lets you find a more intimate contact, even if you don’t clearly feel it. In our times people may not be so used to reading books anymore, but this doesn’t change the fact that reading happens on the human level.

For example, when you read The Book of Zohar, you discover the importance of the letters, their forms and their order. And it doesn’t matter what language the book is written in. Kabbalists have given us a code in one language – Hebrew (or Aramaic) instead of other languages.

The shape of the letters reflects the model of the soul, like its imprint. The soul has several shapes, and this is how it is “imprinted” in a different form every time.

When we read the text, we go from one letter to another, and accordingly, our soul changes, taking on one form after another. This is why a book is connected to a person’s soul.

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A question I received: Why can’t everyone understand The Book of Zohar?

My Answer: First of all, your mind won’t help you reveal anything. If we read The Book of Zohar trying to understand it with our minds, then we will see nothing more than a system of Musar (ethics), repeated warnings, instructions and strange tales.

It is only by opening up a new sense inside you, called the point in the heart, that you will begin to see a whole world when reading that same story. The Book of Zohar will suddenly begin to reveal itself within you.

Remember, there’s nothing outside of you. We think that the spiritual world is somewhere out there, but actually it becomes revealed inside us. When a person begins to attain qualities and definitions inside him, he enters deep inside the text of this book. The book itself begins to clothe within him, and the person reveals everything he is reading inside of him.

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A question I received: How are things measured in Kabbalah?

My Answer: In the science of Kabbalah, we learn that there is no such thing as an absolute, true system of measurement. Rather, everything is perceived depending on a person’s senses. This is why everything is measured in relation to the person who attains reality. There is a Kabbalistic verse that says, “There is no Creator without a creation.”

This is why it’s important for us to understand that everything that is said by the authors of The Book of Zohar, by King David in the book of Psalms and other sources about the Creator is referring to the quality and depth of the reader’s attainment.

A person is judged in accordance to his position on the ladder, and he perceives the Creator according to where he is positioned on that ladder. It appears to a person that the Creator changes, but this is only because a person evaluates everything according to his own desires and qualities.

The Creator does not change; He is good that does good and He is at absolute rest. In a person however, many Reshimot are awakened at every moment and according to this, he judges the Creator as great or small, good or evil.

This is why we are only able to understand Kabbalistic texts once we have risen to the level of their authors.

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In the News (translated from Kursor.co.il): The Israeli ambassador to the Ukraine said that as a result of the most dire economic and political crisis in the Ukraine, the Jews could be declared as perpetrators of the grave situation in that country.

My Comment: Actually, The Book of Zohar talks about the same thing – see “Introduction to The Book of Zohar”, Items 60-71.

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Find out answers to questions about feelings of despair, how to approach The Book of Zohar, and more:

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People don’t understand what The Book of Zohar actually is. When I just started studying Kabbalah, I was told that The Zohar is Musar (ethics) according to Kabbalah. Musar is a system of moral values, telling people what they should be doing and what they are forbidden from doing because they will be punished for it. These people believe that The Book of Zohar is a book of morals on a higher level, like a decree from Above.

Baal HaSulam writes that many horrible things took place in the world because The Book of Zohar was revealed before the time was right. The Zohar was only supposed to be revealed during the time of the Ari. Why is that? When a person who hasn’t been properly prepared for reading The Zohar reads it, he will not understand it correctly. He will not arrive at the same thoughts and intentions that Rabbi Shimon had when he wrote this text.

This is why Baal HaSulam added his own commentary, titled “Sulam” (Ladder), which includes a “technical” supplement to the text of The Book of Zohar. There he provides a Kabbalistic definition of every word of the Torah and explains where each word or quality is located in the structure of the soul.

This enables the person reading the text to connect both definitions, and thus to experience an inner response to what he is reading. Both worlds become revealed to him – this world and the Upper World, and he senses the Creator’s governance inside the text and inside himself.
(From Part 2 of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson, on the “Preface to the Sulam Commentary”)

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I recently gave another public lecture at the Bnei Baruch Kabbalah Education Center. The topic of this week’s lecture was Baal HaSulam’s article “A Speech for the Completion of the Zohar“.

These public lectures are held every Tuesday at 7:00pm Israel time and are broadcast live on our TV channel “YES-66” and on Kabbalah TV with simultaneous translation into English, Spanish, German, Italian, Turkish, and Russian.

[Show slideshow]

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A question I received: Kabbalah bases part of its reasoning on a certain chronological order, scaled by the millennia of the Babel Kingdom’s existence and by the dates of Adam’s life in Babylon. However, the work of a modern mathematician in the area of historic chronology (Anatoly Fomenko, Professor of Mathematics at Moscow State University and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences ), casts doubt on the generally accepted sequence and the dates of events. For instance, he dates the Egyptian pyramids to the 11th-14th centuries B.C.E. as per the dates of Zodiacal images found in them. This means that egoism wasn’t growing for 2000 years. The dates of the books can also be wrong, with manuscripts mistakenly dated as being more ancient, when, in fact, they were written later.

Kabbalah, being an extension of science beyond our world into the spiritual, relies on the sciences of this world, including history and chronology. What if the actual chronology is radically revised: can it be possible that the Kabbalists are also mistaken in their descriptions of historic events (the dating of Adam’s life as well as the lives of other Kabbalists?

My Answer: Up until now, all doubts about the Bible’s validity have been proven wrong, historically speaking, which confirms the authenticity of the Biblical story. The Biblical calendar starts with Adam – the beginning of man’s correction in this world, and it concludes with the final correction of all people, throughout 6000 years.

Over the past 5769 years, everything predicted by the Bible (as we, Kabbalists, know) has come true. The Book of Zohar, written 2000 years ago, says that our times (from the year 1995 on) is the time of this book’s revelation. And this is coming true! There are more things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. However, everyone has the right to doubt everything in the world. This is the right of every scientist.

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