October 22, 2024
October 28, 2014 at 5:30 pm · Filed under Articles, Books
Anyone With a Desire for Spirituality Should Study Kabbalah
The study of Kabbalah was forbidden to the masses for many generations. Kabbalists prohibited the study to women, children, and men under forty (in Kabbalah, age forty signifies intelligence—Bina—when a person already understands that the purpose of life is giving, something the public cannot under- stand because they are still at a beastly level). In other words, this kind of learning was forbidden to those who hadn’t evolved enough to be able to study Kabbalah.
However, as soon as there is a spark, a sensation of the appearance of a soul, one must study Kabbalah. When Rav Kook was asked, “Who can study Kabbalah?” he replied simply, “Anyone who wants to!” Desire is the one and only requirement for the development of the soul.
Baal HaSulam writes that if a person is ready to study Kabbalah, but refrains from doing so, then that person is the reason for all the disasters because he or she did not contribute his or her share to the management of creation. The collective law of reality is built in such a way that if a person must take an active part in the leadership of reality and refrains from doing so, the rough part of nature comes in its place. That switch between the force of humanity and the force of nature is felt in our world as tragedies and pains. As soon as we begin to feel a desire for the Creator, we must learn how to correct ourselves and thus change reality. If we refrain from doing that, we bring about more evil in the world.
Kabbalah Today & the Special Significance of Israel
Throughout history, Kabbalists were the ones to define the edification of the nation. For example, during the British mandate in Israel (1917–1948), Baal HaSulam tried to publish a Kabbalistic magazine. He saw that the time had come when the public wanted to approach the spiritual degree that only a chosen few had reached before. Hence, he tried to explain to the people about the Kabbalah. But there was still a need to convey it in a simple and easily understandable manner.
Why is this edification needed now, while it was not needed a hundred or two hundred years ago? Only after the last deportation in the previous century, and the return to the land of Israel, did a new era begin in the evolution of the souls. When the Creator brought us back to the land of Israel, He also brought us back to the spiritual soil, giving us an opportunity for spiritual operations and sublime attainments. That process is only just beginning; hence the new need to explain Kabbalah to the entire generation today.
In the past there wasn’t a need to study Kabbalah. Baal HaSulam wrote that there were many people who attained high spiritual degrees through the written and oral Torah alone. But Kabbalah books contain a greater illumination of upper light, which can assist one in the correction process. Though all holy books were written from the highest spiritual degree of the “end of correction,” the Kabbalah books that were written for our generation have a unique shine to them, instead of a general illumination, because they were written especially for those who want spiritual elevation in our time.
Why Everybody Will Eventually Study Kabbalah
Kabbalists do not say that we must teach everyone, but in our time in history it must be understood that Kabbalah is a method of development that obligates everyone. People often come, listen, and leave, and by doing so they prepare themselves for the next stage in the correction. Reading the books of Kabbalah is also a correction, and the rest is up to the Creator.
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September 25, 2014 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Articles, Books, Zohar
Why Spirituality Should Be More Important than Corporeality
At the end of his “Introduction to the Zohar,” Baal HaSulam writes that if we preferred spirituality to corporeality and spiritual laws to corporeal laws, if we chose a spiritual leadership over the corporeal one, we would organize our world correctly, exactly like the spiritual world, and then our inner values would not collide with the values that come down to us, and we would feel pleasure and peace instead of pain and suffering.
The Secret of Influencing Your Reality
When tragic things happen to us in this world, there is nothing we can do to change it. Things happen as inevitable consequences of earlier thoughts, and there is no way to act in the spirit against something that already descends on you from above. All you can do in this world is to try as much as you can to avoid bodily harm, in our world of consequences. If you really want to influence your reality to avoid future tragedies, you should rise upward, to your origin, your root, and the place where the root of your enemy lies as well, and begin to sort things out there. The immediate result will be that everything in our world will change, because there is nothing in our world that is not a result of the world above.
Spiritual Development Requires Practicality
In many Jewish homes there are copies of The Zohar, mezuzahs (a text from the Bible that Jews place on doorposts), and charms. People think that there is some power in them, but in fact they do not help us today. We’ve come to a point in history when we have to rise above these things; we should go beyond them and get to know the power itself, its operations on us, rather than thinking that if we put up a mezuzah everything is going to be all right. We have to start being practical and focus on the upper force.
Why the Study of Advanced Kabbalah Books Requires the Study of Introductory Books First
Before we study The Zohar, we must first study several introductory books. There is much to read and learn to know how to open the book and what to search for in it.
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September 10, 2014 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Articles, Books
What Does Kabbalah Study?
The Kabbalah is a science that studies the system of creation, the way it was formed, the root of its essence and its structure. It examines how the Creator conducts this system and how creation should correct itself to rise to the degree of the Creator, which is in fact the purpose of creation. Kabbalah is a science that deals with drawing near to the Creator, whereas religion simply indicates to people what they should do with the protein bodies of our world. The wisdom of Kabbalah has no connection with any popular religious movements.
The Real Reason behind the Development of Hasidism
The Baal Shem Tov created the movement of Hasidism to help the Jewish orthodox person integrate a certain amount of spiritual intention in the performance of the physical Mitzvot (commandments). However, the Baal Shem Tov was first and foremost a Kabbalist of the highest degree. He therefore established Hasidism as a popular movement in order to select out of the masses the few people who had the desire and the ability to become Kabbalists. This way he managed to find disciples who later became the first Admorim (Jewish masters and teachers), who went on to establish their own trends in Hasidism and beyond. The task of the movement was to select the individuals who wanted to attain the Creator from the collective and render certain support to the general public.
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September 8, 2014 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Articles, Books
The Reason for Studying Kabbalah In a Nutshell
If we cannot feel the upper world, it appears to us as though we and the world have our own existence, and we cannot see how much we ourselves and the world we live in are controlled from above. This is the reason we feel that our surroundings are hostile and not a means to rush us back to our root.
Before the soul descends to the body, it is a small point in its root. From there, the soul descends to our world, clothed in a body, and loses contact with its root. It can return to its root only if it annuls the bodily desires for worldly pleasures. There are, all and all, 620 desires in the body. By correcting them, the soul returns to its root, where it receives 620 times more pleasures than it had before its descent.
People who have crossed this road and accomplished this correction are called Kabbalists. They live in our world and in the spiritual root simultaneously. They tell us how to rise in degrees that climb from this world back to our spiritual root. When we read their explanations, we attract the illumination of the upper light that pulls us forward.
How a Kabbalist Operates for Everyone’s Benefit
All through the generations, Kabbalists have helped humanity advance to its goal: the purpose of creation. But that help was mostly secretive, “behind the scenes.” Today, however, because the desire for spirituality has already developed in millions, the Kabbalists clearly state that the help of the entire population is necessary to draw the spiritual light by the study of the wisdom of Kabbalah.
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November 4, 2013 at 6:00 pm · Filed under Articles, Books
When we study Kabbalah correctly, the surrounding Light that is awakened works our souls and initiates the next spiritual state. That state will arrive by itself and replace the present state. By making considerable efforts in the study of Kabbalah, a person can accelerate personal changes. That, in fact, is the only freedom of choice we have in this world.
Baal HaSulam writes in the “Introduction to the Study of the Ten Sefirot” that the Creator rests one’s hand on good fortune and tells him: “Choose this for yourself.” So where, then, is the choice? The choice is, in fact, that either we are pushed from behind, which we will feel as pain, or we run forward by ourselves, ahead of the pain.
This is our only freedom of choice.
Anything that happens in our world, anything that people do, is all predetermined, because all our characteristics and our environment, both internal and external, are predefined by the Creator. Freedom of choice exists only for those who crave spirituality and only by their personal efforts.
Every student wants to know how to accelerate his or her spiritual progress and in so doing, avoid the agony. You can do this in the following ways:
- Read the books of Baal HaSulam, Rabash, and Dr. Laitman. (Ed. These are all available for free to read in the Kabbalah Library).
- Join a group that aims to discover the objective of creation. Be active and do things for the members of the group and the spiritual leader. (Ed. The most recommended way to find a group is to join the Bnei Baruch Kabbalah Education Center, and go through the courses that take students step-by-step through Kabbalah’s fundamental principles, basic concepts and lead into how to work in a group.)
- Begin to write everything you know about spirituality. That way, you can correct your current spiritual degree more quickly and create a need to attain the next degree.
- Take an active part in sharing the wisdom of the Kabbalah. This is the most effective means of all.
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