Monthly Archives: November 2010

1.

Fourth, since the chariot of the other side and the husks are utterly and completely removed from God’s holiness — then how could they ever have been culled from and created by Him, let alone allowed to go on?

This calls for more extensive explanation since it assumes that we’re aware of some fairly abstruse Kabbalistic and otherwise Jewish concepts which we may not be. So we’ll do what we can to spell them out.

The term “chariot” is obviously as old as the item itself, and it’s cited over 150 times in the Jewish Bible. On one level it simply stands for a chariot per se, or any other vehicle. But on another level a chariot stands for the point at which a human being controls — or is controlled by — an animal in transit. Thus a chariot often represents the center of the lifelong struggle between body (the chariot’s horse) and soul (its driver).

In the present instance, though, it stands for something else again — the matrix, environment, or ground of the “other side” and “husks”. And they stand for the same thing overall: the “side” of reality that’s “other” than Godly, and the hard “shell” of materiality over-covering the Godly fruit that one would like to get to.

Ashlag depicts that unholy universe as being “utterly and completely removed from God’s holiness” which is to say completely opposite to Him.

Now, if that’s so, then “how could it ever have been culled from and created by Him” since that’s more or less analogous to a woman giving birth to a stone? And secondly, why would God accommodate something that seems to run counter to His whole Being and intentions?

2.

Fifth, touching upon the Resurrection of the Dead: since the human body is so base that it’s doomed to die and be buried from the outset, and since the Zohar says that the soul can’t ascend to its place in the Garden of Eden until the body decomposes and disintegrates, why then would the body need to be resurrected anyway? Couldn’t the Creator have delighted our souls without (our having to go through) resurrection?

Some more definitions: Inherent to classical Jewish Thought is the belief in a Messianic Era that will be initiated by a righteous leader who will bring on many radical alterations to reality. That will culminate in the Resurrection of the Dead and the dawning of the supernatural World to Come (the state of being which the universe will unfold into after all of the above). It’s also important to know that the “Garden of Eden” spoken of here isn’t the one cited at the beginning of Genesis where Adam and Eve dwelt but rather the numinous environment in which the soul alone dwells (and reaps its reward) after death and before the resurrection.

Ashlag’s point is that it seems odd that the human body — which is so seemingly un-Godly and earthly that it’s doomed to be buried and to decompose in the ground rather than go elsewhere to reap its reward (as the soul does) — would be resurrected along with the soul later on, rather than be utterly forgotten and brushed aside. After all, the soul could just as easily delight in its place in the World to Come on its own!

3.

Even more baffling is our sages’ statement that the dead are destined to be resurrected with all of their defects (in place) in order not to be mistaken for anyone else, and that all those defects will be cured afterwards. For why would God care enough to first bring back someone’s defects and then cure him simply because he’d be mistaken for someone else?

That’s to say that we’d expect the body to enjoy a new supernatural status once it comes back to life, yet we’re taught that it will come back “warts and all” instead, and that only later will those “warts” be undone and the body elevated. Why? We’re told it’s so that everyone will know exactly whom they’re seeing come back to life. But why would that matter?

4.

And sixth, our sages say that man is the focal point of reality, that all the upper worlds as well as this corporeal one along with everything in it were created for him alone (Zohar, Tazriah 40), and they even obliged us to believe that the world was created for our sake (Sanhedrin 37A). But, isn’t that strange? After all, why would God bother to create all that for man, who’s so insignificant and only occupies a hair’s-breadth worth of space in the universe — to say nothing of (his insignificance in comparison to) the upper worlds, whose reaches are immeasurable! Why would God have troubled Himself to create all that for man’s sake? And besides — what would man need all that for?

Ashlag’s last inquiry here focuses on our own centrality for a good reason. For if God Almighty could be said to be not only the Creator of all of reality but its “leading character” as well, then man is its sole supporting character (while everything else serves as stage-props and incidentals).

But in fact, considering how minute we are within the vast reaches of things, we seem on one level to be as awesomely consequential but overlookable as a sudden chink in a vast stopped dam; while on another to be as superfluous as a chink in a tumbler. So why fill the “stage” with so much else?

Notice, by the way, that Ashlag cites mankind’s minuteness much the way others do, but that while they use it to point out our essential insignificance, he will use it to ironically underscore our splendid potency below.

(See Ch’s 34-39 below for the explanation.)

(c) 2010 Rabbi Yaakov Feldman

Feel free to contact me at feldman@torah.org
——————————————————

AT LONG LAST! Rabbi Feldman’s translation of Maimonides’ “Eight Chapters” is available here at a discount.

You can still purchase a copy of Rabbi Feldman’s translation of “The Gates of Repentance” here at a discount as well.

Rabbi Yaakov Feldman has also translated and commented upon “The Path of the Just” and “The Duties of the Heart” (Jason Aronson Publishers).

Rabbi Feldman also offers two free e-mail classes on www.torah.org entitled “Spiritual Excellence” and “Ramchal”

1.

We’d first have to explore a few things before we can solve all that, though we certainly won’t explore anything we’re not allowed to, like God’s very Essence, Heaven forfend! For “no thought can grasp His Essence whatsoever” (Tikkunei Zohar, Introduction), so we dare not think about or reflect upon that. But we will delve into the things we’re commanded to explore, like God’s actions. After all, the Torah charges each one of us to “know your father’s God and serve Him” (1 Chronicles 28:9); and as it’s said, “we know You from Your actions” (Shir HaYichud).

Ashlag now begins to answer his questions by stepping back a bit and laying out certain Kabbalistic principles beforehand.

Let it be said from the outset that underlying Ashlag’s statements here is the supposition that we’re to speak of God while knowing that there are two ways to depict Him overall: God unto Himself, and God as He presents Himself in the world. Make no mistake about it, though: that’s not to say that there are different aspects of the one, sheer, complete, total, unalloyed, and indivisible God. Just that when we speak of Him we’re to take into account how He is unto Himself and how He’s experienced by us now that the world has been created. This point won’t be expanded on after this, however; it’s just a caveat.

The point is that God doesn’t present Himself — appear — in the world as He is per se since the world couldn’t endure that. He appears here on a more subdued, we might even say “suppressed” level (the way geniuses present themselves when they interact with more ordinary people).

And while we’re indeed encouraged and charged to know Him as He presents Himself in the world, which we can deduce from what He does here (the way we can deduce anyone’s character by his or her actions), we’re still-and-all barred from inquiring into Him Himself, i.e., His ultimate thoughts and motivations. For “no thought can” — is able or allowed to — “grasp His Essence whatsoever”.

So we’ll explore God’s ways in the world, from the moment it occurred to Him to create it and onward, but not before that.

2.

So, our first inquiry will touch on this: How could anyone imagine a completely original creation — something utterly new-sprung that hadn’t already been incorporated in God’s Being from the first — when it’s obvious to any thinking person that everything was originally incorporated in His Being (since it’s clear that whoever means to give something can only give it if he himself already has it)?

Ashlag will now address a series of sub-questions. They aren’t reiterations of the five underlying questions we’d just presented but rather new conundrums we’d need to solve before we could go back to the original ones. Just know that this is heady and deeply abstract stuff, so be patient and allow yourself to luxuriate in it.

At the time it occurred to God to create the cosmos (which is our time-frame, don’t forget) all that existed was God Himself and His idea to create it (other thoughts existed, too, but they’re also out of our framework).

It follows then that the entirety that did eventually come about had to have been an utterly new and original phenomenon, rather than a derivation of or a variation on something else ongoing. It had to have “popped up” somehow “out of the blue”, as we’d put it, unlike anything else (which means to say, unlike God Himself).

But, how can there be anything outside of or separate from God? That is, how could anything appear out of the blue in fact? For as Ashlag enunciates it, isn’t it clear that a giver can only give what he himself already has? So, how could anything other than He ever come about?

3.

Second, if you contend that He’s omnipotent so He could certainly have created something out of sheer nothingness, which is to say, something that didn’t already exist in His Being — then what is this “thing” that we’d determine wasn’t found in Him originally but was created out of sheer nothingness?

That is, if in fact the cosmos did come about out of sheer nothingness, as it could very well have, since God can do anything including just that — then what does that say about the nature and makeup of the cosmos? It must be nearly as sublime and utterly inexplicable as God Himself in its perplexity and marvel.

The truth of that should strike us, by the way. After all, the “everything” that has come into being is utterly original and fresh; everything that we know of, as well as everything that we don’t, can’t, and won’t know of is a thing (and non-thing) hatched anew from God’s mind, while every “thing” else is either God Himself or still in His mind.

We’ve raised questions up to now about our essential natures, about God, and about the cosmos at large. Now onto our souls (which we said aren’t our essential natures, if you recall). Did they pop-up out of the blue, too? What are they comprised of? Ashlag begins exploring that by first citing a fundamental Kabbalistic portrayal of the soul.

(This will be the first question answered, see Ch. 7.)

4.

Third, the kabbalists say that the human soul is a “part of God”, the only difference between them being that God is the “whole” while the soul is a “part”. And they equate the two to a rock hewn from a mountain, with the only difference between them being that one is the “whole” and the other is a “piece”.

That’s to say that the reason the human soul is the numinous, very otherwise, singular, and peculiar phenomenon that it is, is because it’s a “part of God”.

First off, understand that we’re not talking about the “battery-cell” that keeps the body alive when we refer to the soul; or about the human heart which is admittedly profoundly occult, forestial, and awash with mystery, but not the soul; or about the nearly equally numinous human mind either. Instead, we’re referring to the immortal utterly non-physical “kernel” that lays both deep within and near-and-far outside our beings.

Each soul, we’re told, is a particular detail in the perfect total makeup of God Himself.

Now, that’s not to say that at bottom God is the sum-total of all souls, since He Himself can’t be defined or limited in any way (as we said). What it means to say is that once God decided to create the cosmos, He allowed for the appearance of our souls as well. And they’re each a part of Him, much the way each segment of a hologram is an independent element of the entire hologram.

But this point itself raises other questions.

5.

Only now we’d need to explore the following. A stone that’s hewn from a mountain had to have been hewn by an axe made for the express purpose of separating the “piece” from the “whole”. But could anyone ever imagine hewing a separate “part” of God, i.e., a soul, which would then be considered a part of His very Essence?

That is, how could God Almighty be divided into parts — and what in the world could ever have actually done that?

(c) 2010 Rabbi Yaakov Feldman

Feel free to contact me at feldman@torah.org
——————————————————

AT LONG LAST! Rabbi Feldman’s translation of Maimonides’ “Eight Chapters” is available here at a discount.

You can still purchase a copy of Rabbi Feldman’s translation of “The Gates of Repentance” here at a discount as well.

Rabbi Yaakov Feldman has also translated and commented upon “The Path of the Just” and “The Duties of the Heart” (Jason Aronson Publishers).

Rabbi Feldman also offers two free e-mail classes on www.torah.org entitled “Spiritual Excellence” and “Ramchal”

1.

What I want to do in this work is clarify certain ostensibly simple things that everyone contends with and which a lot of ink has been spilt over trying to explain, that still-and-all haven’t been spelled out clearly or adequately enough.

Notice that Ashlag is claiming that he’ll be clearing up some seemingly “simple things” which is a fairly humble way for him to put it, since he’ll set out here to solve things that have bothered thinking people for millennia — like the meaning of life, our role in the universe, our relationship to God, and the like!

He apparently terms the things he’ll first touch on as “ostensibly simple” because we tend to think we know the answers already, but his point is that we really don’t. And he implies that he has an entirely different approach to all of it, largely because he does.

Here are the conundrums he’ll be solving for us:

What are we essentially? What role do we play in the great course of events in the cosmos? Why were we created as imperfect as we are — after all, shouldn’t a perfect Creator’s products be perfect themselves? Why did God create so many people who suffer and are tried their whole lives long? And, how could finite, mortal, and ephemeral creatures like ourselves ever derive from an Infinite Being like God as we’re said to?

We’d clearly need to first dissect the questions before we can begin to answer them, but let’s go on though to present the questions. There are five in all. They’re this work’s most basic, underlying questions. There’ll be others, too, but they will be secondary (and tertiary) to these.

2.

First of all, what are we essentially?

There’s no question asked more often than this one, on one level or another, both by each one of us about ourselves and by humankind at large.

We all know what we are basically. We’re this body, this mind; with these feelings, these opinions, this sense of truth, these experiences, etc. But those aren’t us, our selves. They can be termed our “outright self” — the combination of this and that with which we greet others, and which we take into consideration when we think about ourselves. But they’re not what we are essentially.

Don’t assume, though, that Ashlag is going to say that our souls are our essential self, as so many do. He’ll contend that we’re defined by some other phenomenon; and that while we do indeed have souls, we’re to know that they too are part of the “outright self” (albeit a deeper, more abstruse and subliminal, immortal aspect of it, as we’ll illustrate in Ch’s 9 and 20 below).

But now let’s turn to the rest of Ashlag’s underlying questions, which touch on our place in the grand scheme of things, our stature, God’s intentions for the universe, the place of pain and suffering, and our relationship to God.

3.

Second, what role do we play in the great course of events which we’re such minor players in?

We’d only be expected to wonder where we fit in, once we know who we are at bottom, which was the gist of the first question. After all, given that God is all-powerful, all-knowing, purposeful, and well-intentioned too (as we’ll soon determine), it follows that everything and everyone created by Him must play some role or another in His creation. So, which one do we humans play?

Is it a major or a minor role? We’d imagine we’d only be expected to play a minor one, seeing how thick in the midst of so much matter and so many events and phenomena far more colossal and portentous than us we seem to be.

4.

Third, when we consider ourselves closely we find ourselves to be as tainted and lowly as can be, and yet (conversely) when we look at our Creator we can’t help but praise Him for how utterly exalted He is! But wouldn’t a perfect Creator’s creations be expected to be perfect?

That’s to say, we seem to be so base and garish at bottom, while God Almighty our Creator is so grand and sublime — which then raises the question of why one such as He would create us as we are. (See Ch. 17 below.)

5.

Fourth, logic would suggest that God is all-good and utterly benevolent. So, how could He have purposefully created so many people who suffer and are tried their whole lives long? Wouldn’t an all-good Creator be expected to be benevolent — if not at least less malevolent?

God has no needs. After all, He’s perfect, utterly self sufficient, independent of everything, and fully contained. Thus everything He does is for “the other”. And since a being who does things only for the other is benevolent (by definition, since there’d be no need for him to harm the other, which is only a self-serving need), then why does God indeed allow so many of us to suffer? It seems so “out of character” for Him.

Understand the ramifications of this question, if you will.

For indeed nothing lies deeper beneath the surface of human consciousness than the fact of suffering and the distinct possibility of sudden, virulent woe at that. After all, who hasn’t heard of quick accidents out of the blue that maimed their victims? Or of sudden gunshots rushing through windows and mangling chance targets?

There are two broad reactions to that fear overall, though. The first is based on a deep and primal conviction that no Divine Entity would ever allow such a thing to happen, so when it does, that proves that there’s no God. But the second reaction is based on the equally deep and primal conviction that nothing is as it appears to be (which is confirmed every day), and that while God’s ways are largely inexplicable, He still-and-all has our best interests in mind. Those who believe that draw comfort from the idea that when we suffer, we do so for some good reason. Yet they’re still thrown by their pain and misery, and left in an emotional — if not a philosophical — quandary.

So we’d need to understand the underpinnings of suffering in fact if we’re to be steadfast in our faith.

6.

And fifth, how could finite, mortal, and ephemeral creatures (like us) ever derive from an Infinite Being who is without beginning or end?

In other words, how did we manage to be products of an Almighty Creator who’s so unlike us, as we indicated (See Ch. 18 below)?

(c) 2010 Rabbi Yaakov Feldman

Feel free to contact me at feldman@torah.org
——————————————————

AT LONG LAST! Rabbi Feldman’s translation of Maimonides’ “Eight Chapters” is available here at a discount.

You can still purchase a copy of Rabbi Feldman’s translation of “The Gates of Repentance” here at a discount as well.

Rabbi Yaakov Feldman has also translated and commented upon “The Path of the Just” and “The Duties of the Heart” (Jason Aronson Publishers).

Rabbi Feldman also offers two free e-mail classes on www.torah.org entitled “Spiritual Excellence” and “Ramchal”

There are certain religious texts that confirm a person’s beliefs (loudly or quietly) and please him or her. But there are others, like Rabbi Yehudah Ashlag’s Introduction to the Zohar, that upend the believer. For what Ashlag does here — among many other things — is present us with the more ignoble human motivations; with what matters more than one would ever have thought and what is meaningless; with who and what he deems God is and is not; with the makeup of the ultimate future and the content of the human situation given that; and with, at bottom, the point of it all. He demands a lot of the reader in the process, including considering who he or she actually is and what life is all about. He likewise challenges that same reader to see things through a Kabbalist’s eyes, which is to say complexly and in grandly, splendidly nuanced ways.

In point of fact, Kabbalah is a very technical subject that’s rooted in principles and mechanisms that God is said to have used in creation and which He then continues to use to nourish and maintain the cosmos, which its practitioners lay out so as to enable the adept to experience a sort of reenactment of all of that deep in his or her being.

As such, there’s a world (and more) of data to contend with in Kabbalistic texts, a wealth of principles to grasp and internalize, and a staggering amount of worldly and otherworldly interactions to have explicated. The truth be known, Ashlag’s Introduction to the Zohar doesn’t touch on the latter very much at all (though it offers a fair share of technical points). Instead, it’s a philosophical work rooted in the experience of one who is said to have gone through all the above on his own and tried to express that to non-Kabbalists in more experiential terms. It’s also an arcane and tightly bound work that’s difficult to understand since it delves into the sort of existential issues we’d noted above.

Curiously enough though, despite its title, this work actually has very little to do with the Zohar per se. Though it indeed bears upon ideas expressed or implied there, still-and-all Introduction to the Zohar is actually a misnomer. This short work is more like an introduction to Ashlag’s own thoughts. It’s only given the title it has because it comes at the beginning of his major commentary to the Zohar (discussed below), and because of the few though important references to the Zohar toward the end.

Indeed, the work would best be termed One of Several Introductions to Rabbi Yehudah Ashlag’s Edition of the Zohar since he offers other preparatory essays before starting his comments to the Zohar, but such a title wouldn’t do. So I’ve decided to call this book The Kabbalah of Self because it helps us understand ourselves through Kabbalistic eyes.

2.

Rabbi Yehudah Ashlag wrote a number of very technically exact and well-ordered works on the “nuts and bolts” of Kabbalah, with all many components laid out plain therein. The most prominent of them is his Talmud Esser Sephirot (“A Study of the Ten Sephirot”) which is an encyclopedic laying-out and explanation of the eminent Kabbalist Yitzchak Luria’s writings; and his several other shorter works, include his P’ticha L’Chochmat HaKaballah (“Opening to the Science of Kabbalah”) and others we’ll mention shortly.

Considered by many to be the last major Kabbalist in our age, Rabbi Yehudah Ashlag was born on September 14, 1885 in Warsaw, Poland and died on Yom Kippur Day (September 26) 1955 in Tel Aviv, Israel. He was reported to have studied Kabbalah from the age of seven, and to have hidden away kabbalistic works in the Talmudic text he was presumed to be studying from.

A loyal Chassid, Ashlag was a student of the Rebbe of Prosov who belonged to the school of the renown and sharp-witted Kotzker Rebbe where he was nourished on many of the thoughts that he would later expand upon in his own works. Yet Ashlag learned German on his own at a certain point and read the works of the renowned philosophers Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, and Nietzsche in the original. Ashlag is even said to have participated in socialist and communist demonstrations in Warsaw and to have closely followed world political developments.

He moved to Israel at age 31 and quickly found his way to the kabbalistic Yeshiva of Beit El, but he was terribly and virulently disappointed with the Jerusalem Kabbalist’s whose approach to Kabbalah study which he later harshly attacked. For while he sought to plumb its depths, the Beit El scholars who in fact knew the Zohar and Isaac Luria’s works by heart, nonetheless claimed that it was not humanly possible to grasp their meaning, and so they merely recited and meditated upon them but never delved upon them. Ashlag called them “fools”.

Ashlag eventually drew around him a group of disciples who studied Kabbalah every night with him in the 1930’s from midnight until dawn. And he openly promoted the study of Kabbalah for all. Aside from Talmud Esser Sephirot and P’ticha L’Chochmat HaKaballah cited above, Ashlag also authored a translation into Hebrew of the Zohar from the original Aramaic with his original commentary, known as HaSulam (“The Ladder”), and several other kabbalistic-philosophical works including Mattan Torah (“The Bestowing of the Torah”), Pri Tzaddik (“Fruit of The Righteous One”), and others.

3.

A couple of points need to be made about this work, though. First off, we set Ashlag’s words by bold font, while our comments are set in standard font; and we’ve broken down the chapters into sections for ease of reference. Secondly, we’ve tried to offer a translation that’s true to the original which is nonetheless accessible to an intelligent, well-read readership that’s unacquainted with classical Jewish thought and would need to have details filled in. As such, we’ve taken some liberties with the original text and have gone to great pains to explicate its author’s complex ideas.

Because this work is difficult we’ll lay-out its themes here and direct you to the chapters that delve into the subject at hand.

Ashlag starts off the first chapter by saying that he’d “clarify certain ostensibly simple things that everyone contends with and which a lot of ink has been spilt over trying to explain, that still-and-all haven’t been spelled out clearly or adequately enough”. And he begins by raising five succinct and cogent questions:

1) What are we essentially? 2) What role do we play in the great course of events which we’re such minor players in? 3) When we consider ourselves closely we find ourselves to be as tainted and lowly as can be, and yet (conversely) when we look at our Creator we can’t help but praise Him for how utterly exalted He is! But wouldn’t a perfect Creator’s creations be expected to be perfect? 4) Logic would suggest that God is all-good and utterly benevolent. So, how could He have purposefully created so many people who suffer and are tried their whole lives long? Wouldn’t an all-good Creator be expected to be benevolent — if not at least less malevolent?, and 5) How could finite, mortal, and ephemeral creatures (like us) ever derive from an Infinite Being who is without beginning or end?

He then raises another series of inquiries in the second and third chapters that he feels we’d need to clear up before we could solve the more essential questions raised before.

He now asks, 6) How could anyone imagine a completely original creation, something utterly new-sprung that hadn’t already been incorporated in God’s Being from the first, when it’s obvious to any thinking person that everything was originally incorporated in His Being? 7) But since He’s omnipotent, He could certainly have created something out of sheer nothingness; so what then what is this “thing” that was created out of sheer nothingness? 8) The kabbalists say that the human soul is a “part of God”, the only difference between them being that God is the “whole” while the soul is a “part”. And they equate the two to a rock hewn from a mountain; with the only difference between them being that one is the “whole” and the other is a “piece”. But a stone that’s hewn from a mountain had to have been hewn by an axe made for the express purpose of separating the “piece” from the “whole”. But how could anyone ever imagine hewing a separate “part” of God, i.e., a soul? 9) Since evil is utterly removed from God’s being, then how could it have been culled from and created by Him, let alone allowed to go on? 10) And seemingly tangentially, why would a human body be resurrected along with the soul, as we’re taught it is to be? And why would the body be brought back to life with all of its defects in place, as we’re taught it will be? 11) And finally, the sages say that man is the focal point of reality, that all the upper worlds as well as this corporeal one along with everything in it were created for him alone; but why would God bother to create all that for man? And besides — what would man need all that for?

The answers are laid out in the rest of the book. But Ashlag warns us that we’d need to begin by learning why we were created in the first place. And so we’re told that “the only reason God created the universe was to grant pleasure to His creations”; and as a consequence He “created us with a great desire to accept what He wanted to grant us”, measure for measure (Ch. 6).

This “desire to accept”– what’s also termed our willingness to only accept, rather than to bestow or our ratzon l’kabel in Hebrew — will prove to me Ashlag’s greatest insight into the human mind.

It not only touches on our very human need to satisfy our every desire, but also on basic human selfishness and egocentricity. Perhaps his greatest perception into that, though, is the fact that it isn’t all-bad as we might think he’d take it to be. After all, it was granted us by God for His own intentions, which were that we use this desire to accept so as to derive the sort of pleasure He’d like us to. Ashlag is not claiming that God allows us hedonism though, by any means; or that the spiritual life is worthless and counterproductive. His point will be that the sort of pleasure that God would like us to derive is “the pleasure of His company” if you will, which is to say, the experience of God’s being itself. This will all be explained in the book.

In any event, Ashlag’s point is that this ratzon l’kabel is in fact the one and only completely original, utterly new-sprung creation that hadn’t already been incorporated in God’s being from the first, as was raised in question 6 (see Ch. 7).

The answer to question 8, how our souls could be said to be a part of God “much the way that a stone is a part of the mountain that it’s hewn from; the only difference between them being that one is a ‘piece’ while the other is the ‘whole’”. The answer is that the only sort of “axe” that could ever “cleave”, that is, that would differentiate our soul from God would be the fact of our disparate natures. For when two entities are drawn to and repelled by the selfsame things and thus resonate utterly with each other, they can be said to be one and the same, for all intents and purposes, so to speak. That’s to say that while we’re certainly not God nor is He a human being, nevertheless the closer in nature and wherewithal we are to Him, the more Godly are we (Ch’s 8 and 9). This whole notion is chock-full with implication and import, and we explore some of that in the text.

Question 9 about the nature of evil is discussed in Ch’s 10-16 along with a discussion of the two metaphysical systems — the four worlds of so-called “holy-A.B.Y.A.” and their counterpart, the four worlds of “defiled-A.B.Y.A.” — and how all that works toward drawing us closer to God. Included in all this is a far-ranging explanation of Ashlag’s understanding of eternity, free choice, the ultimate redemption, and more.

The question of our apparent lowliness (no. 3) is cause to explain our true spiritual station in Ch. 17, while Ch. 18 goes on to respond to the fifth question, about our having derived from God’s infinite being, and it leads to our being the focal point of all of creation.

That brings us back to the fourth question about the place of human suffering in the grand scheme (Ch. 19) which then brings us all the way back to Ashlag’s very first question about our essential makeup, which allows for a discussion about our ultimate destiny (Ch’s 20-24). We turn from there to a solution to question 10 about the makeup and ramifications of resurrection, which then leads to an explanation of how we’re to undo our willingness to only accept (Ch’s 25-28).

We then come to question 2 about the role we play in the great course of and delve into the stature and role of the mitzvah-system development (Ch’s 29-32).

Chapters 33-40 delve into the final question about mankind’s place in the cosmos, and explain the interplay between humankind and other beings in the process. Chapters 41-55 explain why we humans would need all the upper worlds God created for us. And the remaining chapters (56-70) address the spiritual makeup of the present age, and they reveal how our knowledge of the Zohar (which is of course the book’s underlying topic) in particular and Kabbalah in general would help rectify us and satisfy God’s intention for creation.

(c) 2010 Rabbi Yaakov Feldman

Feel free to contact me at feldman@torah.org
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AT LONG LAST! Rabbi Feldman’s translation of Maimonides’ “Eight Chapters” is available here at a discount.

You can still purchase a copy of Rabbi Feldman’s translation of “The Gates of Repentance” here at a discount as well.

Rabbi Yaakov Feldman has also translated and commented upon “The Path of the Just” and “The Duties of the Heart” (Jason Aronson Publishers).

Rabbi Feldman also offers two free e-mail classes on www.torah.org entitled “Spiritual Excellence” and “Ramchal”.

At bottom, this is an inquiry into “The Kabbalah of Self”, but in fact it’s a translation of Rabbi Yehudah Ashlag’s Introduction to the Zohar, chapter by chapter, word for word, and fully explained.

Welcome!