The Purpose of Kabbalah

Throughout history, during those times when Kabbalah was concealed from most people, rivulets of the wisdom still seeped through, which gave rise to various erroneous conjectures about its purpose. Even today, most prevalent concepts about Kabbalah are fundamentally wrong. Kabbalah engages neither in improving the human existence in this world, nor in mystical or ecstatic experiences.

The sole purpose of the wisdom of Kabbalah is realizing the desire for spirituality, which in turn leads a person to realize his or her purpose in life. Once that desire surfaces, a person begins to need the Kabbalah; before that, it is redundant.

Why Kabbalah Is No Longer Hidden

In previous generations, when the desire for spirituality had not yet ripened, Kabbalists set up boundaries on the study of Kabbalah, aiming to filter out those with unripe desires. The few whose desire had ripened in them were imparted the method, despite all the limitations. Now that humanity is experiencing the surfacing of the last degree of the will to receive— the desire for spirituality—concealing the Kabbalah is no longer pertinent. The ban on studying it has been lifted and the filtering at the gate of the study is performed in an entirely different way: Being a method to acquire genuine spirituality, the Kabbalah naturally filters out those with other desires, such as for sex, money, or power. It simply cannot assist in fulfilling those desires.

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Israel: The Journey from Spirituality to Corporeality

The awakening desire for spirituality is called “the land of Israel.” The people who lived in the land of Israel before the ruin of the Second Temple were in spiritual attainment. This means that the spiritual degree of the people of Israel and its presence in the corporeal land of Israel matched at that time. In that state, the people merited living in the land of Israel. When the people of Israel lost their spiritual degree and yielded to egoistic desires—due to the growth of the ego—the mismatch between their spiritual level and their presence in the land of Israel prompted the ruin of the Temple and the exile.

While the past spiritual fall caused the exile of the people of Israel from their land and their dispersion among the nations, today the situation is reversed: the physical return to the land of Israel preceded the spiritual return. Nevertheless, the match between the spiritual root and the corporeal branch must be kept, and for that reason the people of Israel are obliged to attain the spiritual degree called “land of Israel.” For that objective, the wisdom of Kabbalah is a means for the people to correct themselves.

Why the Israeli Nation Must Develop Spirituality to Secure Their Homeland

When Rabbi Ashlag completed his Sulam commentary on The Zohar, he wrote, “From these words we learn that our generation is the generation of the days of the Messiah, hence we have been awarded the redemption of our Holy Land.… We have also been awarded the revelation of The Book of Zohar … but in both, we have only been awarded a gift from the Creator, but we have not received anything in our own hands.”

The physical end of the exile and the return of the people of Israel to their land is not enough. A spiritual return is required. Baal HaSulam distinguishes between what he calls “a time of giving” and “a time of receiving.” A time of giving pertains to the creation of potential existence by the upper force; and the time of receiving is the actual realization of the possibility.

Until the people are corrected, they will not feel comfortable in this land.

The uncertainty and insecurity of day-to-day existence in Israel is there to prompt its dwellers to rise to the spiritual level called “the land of Israel.” The goal of the upper force is to bring humankind to search for the reason, the root of all processes. All the pressures on the nation of Israel by other countries, and its interior social, personal, and national level crises, exist only to compel people to ask about the purpose of their existence in this world.

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Why Each Person Must Enter Into Spiritual Correction

Reality can be changed by anyone, so long as he or she is thinking of the Creator. If his or her soul has ripened through all the cycles and its time has come to know spirituality, it is inevitable that he or she will have to enter the process of spiritual correction and learn to manipulate the spiritual powers. It doesn’t matter where we are in the world, there will be torments and catastrophes standing ready for us wherever we go, as long as we do not realize it. In the end, we are at the center of the world, and there is no escape from that.

It’s All about Taking Responsibility for Your Development

We can anticipate that if we do not wake up now, there will be an increase in our troubles. The more we neglect the matter, the stronger will be the force that we will need to put us back on track. It is just like physics: when you throw something and it is diverted from the right path, the longer it continues off track, the greater its deflection and the greater the force needed to bring it back to the right track. That pattern will happen with us, too, if we do not change our ways. We don’t have a choice but to start listening to what is happening with us.

It is most urgent to realize that nothing happens without a good reason, and that our behavior influences what comes down to us from the upper worlds. We cannot act like small children, crying and searching for ways to escape the troubles of life. We must become part of a mature humanity: one that knows what it is doing and can assume responsibility for its actions. This change in attitude will begin by keeping in mind that there is always a reason for our condition. That realization will prompt a larger shift in our consciousness, and then we will start to look for the reasons behind everything that happens to us in this world.

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A Manual to Come into Contact with the Forces that Govern Reality

If an ordinary person were to begin studying a Kabbalah book in the right way, meaning after having studied the introductions and gone through some preparations, after being given a certain “key,” he or she would see how to communicate with the forces that act on our entire world and would know what to do with them.

In a Kabbalistic prayer book it says, for example, “Extend light from Partzuf Leah, pass it through Partzuf Zeir Anpin to its three Sefirot of NHY, then come down to Rachel, then couple them one with the other.” This is the sort of material you will find in a Kabbalistic prayer book, which is in essence a manual with exact instructions about how to change things in the control room of reality and what to change above to induce the desired change below. But without sufficient preparation, it makes no sense and would not lead the reader to any further understanding.

Today Everyone Must Enter Reality’s Control Room

In all previous generations, the Creator raised a few souls to do their work for the collective, but in our generation, everyone must do this work according to his or her own ripeness. Everyone must open the books of Kabbalah and begin to study the instructions to learn how to change reality. We have to reach the same level and quality of performance within our- selves as is described in the books to make the necessary changes in the upper worlds. All of humankind will eventually have to enter that control room and everyone will come to a place reserved for him or her alone.

The prayer cited earlier describes the way desires and thoughts about reality are meant to be used. The only force that can influence reality is the power of thought and humankind’s willpower. Kabbalists have prepared these prayer books as manuals that show us how to work with our desires. We only need to know how to read them and learn what to do, and we are required to do that right now.

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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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