October 21, 2024
September 5, 2014 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Articles, Books
Why Abraham Is Just As Relevant Today As He Ever Was
Just as the Creation story can be used to help us understand the evolution of our souls and our purpose on the earth, the story of Abraham the Patriarch teaches us about the essentials of growing toward the Creator and coming to know Him in our lives to fulfill our purpose in life. Anyone who ascends from this world toward the Creator and unites with Him must take the same path that Abraham first took, and for which he is regarded as the father of the nation.
If we relate to the Torah as a historic tale, we will see that it is not very different from the histories of other nations. But the Torah does not deal with the past, rather it deals with us. It deals with each and every one of us; with who we are and what we are and what we must do with our lives. The Creator appeals only to people, to each and every person. That is how the Torah explains the entire system of creation. Each person contains everything that exists in all the worlds inside him or her, including our own world. Besides humanity, there is only the Creator. Humanity is the representative of creation and of all the other worlds.
What ‘Abraham’ Really Is
The Creator turns to Abraham, who represents a specific attribute in us and who is like all other properties (nations) in a human (Av Ha’am, Abraham in Hebrew, means “the father of the nation”), and tells him: “I now separate this specific trait in you, which is called Abraham, and you must leave your country, meaning your situation and all the desires that you cur- rently feel. Go from your homeland, and break free from the desires you were born with.”
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August 24, 2014 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Articles, Books
Now You Can Interpret the Bible Properly and Get Everything Out of It
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Now the earth was unformed and void,and darkness was upon the face of the deep;and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters.And God said:“Let there be light.”And there was light.And God saw the light,that it was good;and God divided the light from the darkness.And God called the light Day,and the darkness He called Night.And there was evening and there was morning, one day. (Gen.1:1–5)
Every one of us, when hearing these verses, is moved in some way. However, we rarely settle for the simplified interpretations that leave many questions open. What does the Torah really talk about? And most importantly, what for?
All the holy Scriptures speak of one thing only—the upper world and how it was created and how the upper world created our world. The Bible doesn’t just describe what one finds in that world, but also teaches one how to see it. The gradual revelation of the upper world is called the “spiritual ascent,” or the degrees of spiritual rise. The wisdom of Kabbalah is a science that teaches the structure of the upper world, using sophisticated language, drawings, and schemes. The Torah describes the upper world for us in an ordinary language.
Do You Make these Mistakes When it Comes to Interpreting the Bible?
If we try to translate the language of the Torah into the language of the Wisdom of Kabbalah, we see that the Torah describes for us the process of the creation of the upper world, its structure, the design of its development, and after that it depicts the process of humankind’s creation. However, the Torah does not refer to a person of our corporeal world. Rather it refers to the creation of the will to receive, called “soul” or “man” (Adam), and to the purpose of fulfilling this will to receive, this creation, with total, eternal, and complete pleasure. The desire for pleasure is actually the only creation. Besides that there is only the Creator. Thus, everything besides the Creator is no more than various degrees of the will to receive pleasure. That is also the situation in our world: the difference between all creatures and objects is only in the different levels of their will to receive pleasure, and that is what determines the properties of each and every creature.
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June 19, 2014 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Articles, Books
Now You Can Understand What the Bible Is Really About
Kabbalists, as previously mentioned, research the Upper World, the world beyond the perception of an ordinary person. Hence, the depictions of Kabbalists’ attainments relate to the Upper World, but because we are not aware of the existence of a spiritual world besides our own, we ascribe their words to our world, a phenomenon called “materialization.”
When the Torah (Five Books of Moses) was written, the people of Israel were at a spiritual degree. But after two thousand years of detachment from spirituality since the ruin of the Second Temple, the Torah stories seem to refer to historic episodes or moral conduct.
Yet, this is not the case. Each element in the world is connected to the same element in all the other worlds by a “root and branch” connection. Based on that principle, Kabbalists developed a language that relies on the parallelism between the Upper Worlds and our own world. In it, processes unfolding in the spiritual world are described using names of branches taken from our world.
Introducing the 4 Languages of Kabbalah
Kabbalists use four different languages to explain how we can reach the degree of the Creator and how we can draw to ourselves the Correcting Force that will invert our nature from egoism to altruism. These languages are the language of the Bible, the language of laws, the language of legends, and the language of Kabbalah.
In his essay, The Wisdom of Kabbalah and its Essence, Baal HaSulam wrote that there are four languages in the wisdom of truth, and the essence of the wisdom of Kabbalah is no different than the essence of the Bible. However, the laws, the legends, and the language of Kabbalah are the most convenient and appropriate to use.
The difference among the languages is in their accuracy. The language of Kabbalah is more precise in depicting the connection between the root in the Upper World and the branch in the lower world. The more accurately one connects oneself to one’s Upper Root, the greater Correcting Force one receives.
What Is the Best Kabbalah Book for People Living Today?
The language of Kabbalah applies to terms that do not exist in our world, such as “worlds” and “Sefirot,” charts and formulae. This language makes it easier to avoid confusion and materialization, and facilitates a clear and ordered approach to the study. The language of Kabbalah is essentially different from other languages because of the clear, unequivocal way it describes the purpose of Creation—the similarity of the creature to the Creator, i.e. inversion of egoism into altruism.
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March 3, 2008 at 5:29 am · Filed under Articles, Books, Kabbalah Today
Kabbalah Explains the Bible
Article in Kabbalah Today Issue 12
What does it take to author the greatest bestseller of all time? Apparently, it takes as much as discovering a world where there are no words at all, and finding words from our world to describe it. more…
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