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Psalms Commentary – Psalm 61: To the Choirmaster

Psalm 61
To the choirmaster: with stringed instruments. To David.

Hear my cry, O Creator,
listen to my prayer;
2 From the end of the earth I call to you
when my heart is faint.
Lead me to the rock
that is higher than I,
3 For you have been my refuge,
a strong tower against the enemy.
4 May I dwell in your tent forever!
May I take refuge under the shelter of your wings! Selah
5 For you, O Creator, have heard my vows;
you have given me the heritage of those who fear your name.
6 Prolong the life of the king;
may his years endure to all generations!
7 May he be enthroned forever before The Creator;
appoint steadfast love and faithfulness to watch over him!
8 So will I ever sing praises to your name,
as I perform my vows day after day.

We see that the person has gone through a lot in his path, until he discovers that the Creator conceals and reveals Himself, and secondly, protects the person with His wings and cover, and thirdly, protects him practically with His support.

It is hard for a person to connect two forms of guidance, where on one hand, everything comes from the Creator, and on the other hand, he needs to request that the Creator help, protect and cover him. Protect him from what? From the enemies that the Creator Himself arranges for the person?

The Creator organizes His guidance in two lines so that the person can stabilize himself in the middle line. As such, the person is quite confused, and doesn’t exactly know how to be together in all the states, until he acquires the two lines, stabilizes the middle line, and then he has understanding and mutual work with the Creator such that he understands that there is reciprocity, guidance and learning which brings the person to adhesion with the Creator.

Until then, however, in each and every generation, in each and every state, there are states which come and confuse the person a lot in terms of the extent to which he needs to correct the vessels (Kelim) to discover the unity of the Creator’s guidance – in terms of the apparent bad or evil that appears through the uncorrected vessels, and in terms of the good that shines in the corrected vessels – which give the person the ability to perceive through two lines, in which the person constructs himself. The person, the human being (Adam), is the middle line.

“Psalms Commentary – Psalm 61: To the Choirmaster” is based on the Daily Kabbalah Lesson of May 4, 2014, “Preparation.” You can watch and/or download this lesson in video and audio formats from the Kabbalah Media Archive.

What is the Creator? What does it mean that the Creator reveals and conceals Himself? Why is the Creator referred to as “Him,” in masculine form? What are the left, right and middle lines in a person’s spiritual work? What is “adhesion with the Creator”? What does it mean, that a person “corrects his vessels (Kelim)” and what are these “vessels” that the person corrects? What does it mean that the human being (Adam) is the middle line? All these questions and more are dealt with in the Free Kabbalah Course, which provides the fundamental principles and tools by which to correctly approach the wisdom of Kabbalah. It is recommended to take the Free Kabbalah Course before approaching the Daily Kabbalah Lessons with Dr. Michael Laitman. Click the banner below to sign up…

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BaHar (On Mount Sinai) Parsha – Weekly Torah Portion

Leviticus, 25:1-26:2

This Week’s Torah Portion | May 4 – May 10, 2014 – Lyar 4 – Lyar 10, 5774

In A Nutshell

The portion, Bahar (On Mount Sinai), deals primarily with what appears to be laws of finance. It begins with Moses being on Mount Sinai, receiving from the Creator the Mitzva (commandment) of Shmita (omission of cultivation) of the land every seventh year, and the Mitzvot (plural of Mitzva) of Yovel (jubilee, 50th year anniversary). The Creator gives His blessing to it so that the sixth year will be so productive that enough produce will grow to last for the next three years, to observe the Mitzvot of Shmita and Yovel without worrying about sustenance.

Later, the portion details laws of selling a house or property, redemption of a house or a field from one person to another, laws of the lot of the Levites, forbidding selling of towns or houses that belong to them, laws of selling a person from Israel to slavery, how to treat such a person, and laws prohibiting idols, pillars, and figured stones.

 Commentary by Dr. Michael Laitman

The laws that this portion details are spiritual laws. Shmita [1] is a profound and sacred matter. It exists only in the land of Israel, in a desire aimed toward the Creator, in order to bestow, toward love of others. The Shmita can occur in a desire only in a process of correcting the soul.

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Glossary – BaHar (On Mount Sinai) – Weekly Torah Portion

Economy

In spirituality, economy relates to the question, “How do I sustain my soul?” The light may enter the soul only when it is in Dvekut (adhesion) with the Creator. To the extent of Dvekut with the Creator, so is the measure of fulfillment by the Creator. This is how the Creator “sustains” the soul. It is possible to achieve it by correcting the desire. As a person corrects each desire from reception to bestowal, one is promptly filled with the upper light to the extent of one’s correction. This is called “sustaining,” and this is the proper economy.

Selling of Property

When we cannot work with a desire because it is too big or because it offers such a pleasure that we cannot work with it, we sell it. There are corrections in our desires that belong to the great desires, Levush and Heichal. We leave them out of the boundaries where we are working, taking them out of our domain and depositing them for the time being.

Shmita (Omission of Tilling of Land every Seven Years)

Shmita is connection to the degree of Bina, when the upper light corrects everything that happened and gives us strength for the next degree. This is why there are special rules concerning debt and selling of items, under the tutelage of Bina, the great quality of bestowal.

Crop (Yield/Grain)

Crop is reward in the will to receive. Through it, a person begins to actually work with the vessels of bestowal in order to “feed” the world.

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Kabbalah: The Answer to All of Your End of the World Predictions

Getting to the Bottom of the “Keeping Up With the Joneses” Phenomenon

We can see just how much we always want what others have in Item 38 of Kabbalist Yehuda Ashlag’s “Introduction to The Book of Zohar,” stating that “Man [Stage four], who can feel others, becomes needy of everything that others have, …and is thus filled with envy to acquire everything that others have. When he has a hundred, he wants two hundred, thus his needs forever multiply until he wishes to devour all that there is in the whole world.”

But earlier in the introduction (Item 25), Ashlag writes, “Since the Thought [of Creation—the Creator’s goal] was to delight His creatures, He had to create an overwhelmingly exaggerated desire to receive all that bounty, which is in the Thought of Creation [to give us unbounded pleasure].” And he continues, “If the exaggerated will to receive perished from the world, the Thought of Creation would not be realized—meaning the reception of all the great pleasures that He thought to bestow upon His creatures—for the great will to receive and the great pleasure go hand in hand. And to the extent that the desire to receive it diminishes, so diminish the delight and pleasure from receiving.”

Hence, if we want to become Creator-like, we must not diminish our desires. But if we do not diminish our desires, then our ability to eliminate self-centeredness and become Creator- like will fail if all we have in our medicine cabinet are the old remedies of religious fanaticism, oppression, tyranny or any other of the old means of discipline. Those methods were good for “taming” the desire to receive in its earlier stages, but they will not suffice for today’s level of desire to receive.

A new method, a fresh code of action is required, something that will not try to suppress the insuppressible, but will harness the new powers that extreme egoism evokes to improve life, instead of destroying both humankind and our pathogenic egocentricity.

 

Competition or Cooperation? The Need to Choose Wisely

In Stage Three of the evolution of desires, our envy has created an interconnected and interdependent world where we compete against, yet depend on each other for sustenance. Again we can quote Ashlag, who wrote, “Because each person in the world draws his life’s marrow and his livelihood from all the people in the world, he is coerced to serve and to care for the well-being of the whole world.”

We can also quote McGrew’s statement: “This [single global system] defines a far more complex condition, one in which patterns of human interaction, interconnectedness, and awareness are reconstituting the world as a single social space.” These quotes accurately reflect our situation at the start of the 21st century: we are tied together, and hateful of each other.

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To Be or Not to Be an Altruist

The fundamental characteristic of any creature is self-concern, which brings about competitiveness. Simultaneously, evolution locks self-serving creatures into a completely interdependent system, creating a potentially devastating paradox…

The Thing that Separates Man from the Rest of Nature

On the lower levels of desire—in Stages One through Three, or on the inanimate, vegetative and animate levels of Nature—Nature mends the ties by itself. In the process of evolution, the elements in Nature that follow the rule of yielding self-interest before the interest of their host system survive and form the basis for the next level in evolution. The ones that do not yield their self-interests perish.

Thus, gradually, Nature built the universe, galaxies, our solar system, and planet Earth. Then, layer by layer, life on Earth was formed.

As biologist Elisabet Sahtouris so eloquently explained, initially each new creature conducts itself selfishly, oblivious to the existence and needs of other creatures. But the struggle among the creatures forces them, as she put it, to “negotiate,” eventually leading to the creation of homeostasis—the stability necessary for the persistence of life.

The Strange Reason Why the Desire to Be Superior to Others Forces You to Connect

In this manner, life on Earth evolved stage by stage until at Stage four in the evolution of desires, Homo sapiens appeared. Initially, humans were just like all other creatures. Just as desires evolve in the whole of Nature, our desires, too, evolved stage by stage, from Zero through Four. In Stages Zero through Two, the desires for greed, control, and cognizance were not potent enough to separate us from nature to a point that threatens our existence. Like all other elements of Nature, we were forced to negotiate and accept the power of the elements as one of life’s necessities. However, history shows we were not quite as pliable and tolerant toward other humans.

But roughly since the 15th century, Stage Three took hold. Since then, cravings for self-expression and personal excellence have been growing in us and expanding exponentially.

There is a peculiar quality to the desires for recognition and personal distinction. Although these desires reflect a self- centered nature, since they aim to present the individual who possesses them as superior to others, they also compel those who have them to connect to others. This is so because to be superior to others, one must measure one’s qualities, achievements, efforts, and possessions compared to those of others. If I do not compare myself to others, over whom can I be superior?

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