February 5, 2025
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.
Read the rest of this entry »
October 25, 2014 at 5:30 pm · Filed under Articles, Books
How the Desire for Spirituality Begins with an Enormous Unclarified Desire
As soon as a spark of spirituality appears in you, even as an impulse that is still hidden from your eyes, you stop being satisfied with your life. You begin to search for something beyond money, honor, sex, food, power, and knowledge and don’t know where to find what you really want. This is the first time you feel that there is something beyond your surroundings in this world. That spark evolves later on to become the desire for contact and adhesion with the Creator.
All throughout this journey, a person is defined by his or her unique desire to cleave to the Creator, differentiating humanity from other life forms. People still have within them the desires of the still, vegetative, and animate degrees, but our specific degree is measured by the intensity of our desire for the Creator.
The Need for Spirituality Is the Final Level of Human Desire to Develop
In his introduction to the book Panim Meirot Umasbirot (Illuminating and Welcoming Face), Baal HaSulam writes that all the desires except the one called “human” are measured by the desired object:
- In the still degree, desires are turned toward food, sex, and family, meaning bodily and beastly pleasures.
- In the vegetative degree, desires are turned toward money and security.
- In the animate degree, desires are turned toward power, control, and respect.
- In the speaking degree, desires are turned toward spirituality. A person’s desires have by now evolved to such an extent that he or she desires something outside the physical world.
Read the rest of this entry »
October 21, 2014 at 5:30 pm · Filed under Articles, Books
The Shift from Suffering to Spirituality
Kabbalah teaches us that at the beginning the Creator uses pain, and unfulfilled desires in order to turn the person’s attention towards spirituality. Thus one’s reality is full of pain and suffering until one starts to locate the source, and the meaning of it all.
Reality changes because if we strengthen our contact with the Creator, there will no longer be a need for pain, the very same pains that are initiated from above to bring about that contact.
Thus, the external circumstances will change, since we will no longer require the same pains.
How Life’s Torments Build in You a Desire for Spirituality
People do not understand how changes in the world occur or how. But the torments they suffer make them search subconsciously for an upper power and pray to it because there is no one else on whom to rely. That prayer, that earthy still prayer, works. Using the torments, the Creator puts us in a no-win situation and corners us until we actually start looking for an alternative planet to live on. But that planet cannot be found, except in the Creator.
For example, it is interesting to consider why the Creator brought the Jewish people to the corporeal land of Israel, rather then to the spiritual one. The return to Israel was the result of a prayer that was lying in our subconscious and of the pain and suffering we Jews had endured over many years. We prayed for our own place, and we received that place. But if we had truly understood that our sufferings had happened for a certain purpose, then our prayer, the prayer of the unsatisfied mass, would have been aimed differently, and a new solution would have arisen on a different level, a spiritual one.
Read the rest of this entry »
September 30, 2014 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Articles, Books, What is Kabbalah?
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.
Read the rest of this entry »
September 22, 2014 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Articles, Books
Introducing the Pyramid of Your Desires
A pyramid of souls exists, based on the desire to receive. At the base of the pyramid are many souls with small, earthly desires, looking for a comfortable life in an animal-like manner: their focus is food, sex, and sleep. The next layer comprises fewer souls, those with the urge to acquire wealth. These are people who are willing to invest their entire lives in making money and who sacrifice themselves for the sake of being rich. Next are those who will do anything to control others, to govern and reach positions of power. An even greater desire, felt by even fewer souls, is for knowledge; these are scientists and academics, people who spend their lives engaged in discovering some- thing specific. They are interested in nothing but their all-important discovery. Located at the zenith of the pyramid is the strongest desire, developed by only a small number of souls, for the attainment of the spiritual world.
How to Enlarge the Importance of Your Best Desire
We all have this pyramid of desires within us, which we must turn upside-down so that the sheer weight of the top will compel us to aim for the purest desire, the infinite desire for truth. We must reject and discard all our earthly, egoistic desires and put every effort and energy into increasing the desire for spirituality. This is achieved through the proper way of studying.
When people truly wish to increase their longing for spirituality, then the light around them, the spiritual world hidden from them, starts to reflect back on them, making them long for it even more. At this stage, group study under a Kabbalist’s guidance is crucial. A major change in the souls descending today is that they have a definite desire to achieve spirituality. Even ordinary people are seeking something spiritual, something beyond our world.
Read the rest of this entry »
Next entries »
