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AR’s main themes, chumash and sci, sci/relig
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Deeper meaning of clichés/obvious statements/wisdom sayings
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Many of the ideas in Living Inspired are similar to my FW ideas, creation-ex-nihilo/creativity/FW etc, I should make it more explicit. Connect up my ideas from chumash book to my life-wisdom ideas, eg the deeper meanings of obvious things (grass is greener, don’t know what you have til its gone), and to some things from travel etc, to Retro Un book ideas etc, chumash should have meaning at cosmological level and also at personal life and self-growth level, and my vorts should reflect this.
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A stitch in time saves nine: it is our nature to ignore problems when they are small, but these tend to grow; why do we ignore it? Bec it is work to fix, and we push it off or think it is fine as is. But if we now can focus on the amount of effort or trouble it will be later, then that will weigh on our minds so much that we will summon up the determination to take care of it now, ie it is a a suggestion of a technique how to overcome the natural tendency to ignore things when they are still small.
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…………AR take on HaRav Ashlag via R Brandwein via Raphi: ……………...
AR: It is a fact that some people can sometimes seemingly ‘choose’ to be happy. There’s a hidden issue of FW here, whether those who chose to be happy were simply wired to do so, to ‘choose’, or whether it truly is a choice.
One can make this ‘secular psychological’ insight into a religious tenet: we are designed by God to be able to attach to joy, to experience God as giving in joy. We have FW, and can exert it to make the choice to be happy/experience joy.
According to HaRav Ashlag (via R Brandwein via Raphi): The deepest way to do a mitzvah is via happiness, the happiness is its essence, because that is the way to attach to God, who is operating via joy.
We should stir up the happiness in us when we do a mitzvah, happiness that we ar emaking God happy by doing the mitzvah.
The main way/one way to joy is via Tfilah (avodah).
We should pray and consider that we are doing it for God, to make God happy, and we should feel happiness that we are asking God happy, and then the feeling of Joy enables us to connect to God because then we are operating as God does.
AR: God has given us this gift, that we can pray and consider it a giving, and thus a way to experience joy, and thus to connect to God.
Raphi: we always do things because we want to, it gives us pleasure, whether higher or lower.
AR: As per R Tatz, it is necessary to change the ratzon, and the way to do that is via prayer, so I combine Tatz and Raphi by saying something like this: the way to change the ratzon is by wanting different things, via prayer we attach to joy and that motivates us to want those things?
When God created the universe there was maximal joy on God’s part: Yismach Hashem BeMaa’asav”, when we give we feel joy, we connect up to God by being the same as God.
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Akiva Tatz: gives credit for all the ideas to: R Moshe Shapiro, R Mordechai Miller, R Yitzchok Zev Josef
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Relating ideas of “Living Inspired” to what I wrote re FW/cosmology, and cosmology/Kabbalah etc, and to Rabbi Brandwein-R Ashlag
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II. Structure of the Mind
Chapter 8: Silence:
Ch 9: Desire:
I. Body & Mind (AR’s word).
Body’s root is the neshama, mind’s root is FW. (“the inner wisdom has a higher root…ratzon, desire. In this source lies the origin of all inner life. The outer mind can never initiate…
Nothing, emptiness..suddenly there is something,flash of an idea. At the interfacei is desire, the motivating energy of brining something into being from nothing.
…...the motivation is ratzon – ‘desire’ or ‘will’., the source of all inner life
No thought can be traced more deeply than to this point…the ultime reason for choosing to do this or that….the deepest source of all outflow in the mind and neshama…this deep root is the tool of bechira….bechira is expressed as the tzelem elokim …that is why the ultimate source of all is ‘ratzon hashem’.
Ratzon is the root of personality, it is all of personality, everything else is derivative of it, automatic consequence of it (like a machine) In terms of meaning it is everything,. SUpoerficila change sin the personality are only change sin the strategy of how to achive the same end, the only meaningful change is in the root. The challenge is to fight down to one’s core, lay it bare, reach the interface with the root f th neshama which is beyond it and animates and inspires it..
II. Desire and the depth of Prayer: the exercise which most directly develops this contact with the root of desire is tefilla. Purpose of tefilla is to change not God or God’s will but to change US, our ‘personaity’ in the meaning as mentioned above.
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R Brandwein:
Show Rafi my BH booklet with FW article re FW is the activator. And the other article with the connection to Breishis etc.
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Check who else R Tatz gives credit to for content other than R Moshe Shapiro.
Living inspired $1
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Editing for my reformulation of R Brandwein:
Add re 4 worlds, Asiya , doing
Make it a commentary on breishis, ie quote the psukim with the concepts used as basis, and say this can be seen as a commentary. Preface that torah shebichsav is subset of sheb’al’peh.
Vessel = kli =à desire to receive
Typo of sorts, I wrote – instead of the word ‘minus’, and it is not comprehensible as a result.
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office@baalhasulam.org, thekellmans
I am sending my reformulation of Harav Brandwein’s words. I would of course be interested in his comment.
I also have some advice about the cover and opening of the booklet:
It’s purpose à Its Purpose, no apostrophe!
The quote re Messiah seems odd and out of place as preface, and can turn off a casual reader, so maybe it should be placed later.
Perhaps add a blurb on the cover:
· Kabbalistic insights, but without Kabbalistic terminology
· Novel yet founded on ancient tradition
· living a fulfilling meaningful life, overcoming pain and suffering
· With application to current issues such as capitalism and society, science and religion
Change: Man à Humanity
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My reformulation:
The torah teaches that we are created in the image of God. On the one hand God is transcendent and beyond out understanding, but on the other hand we are created in God’s image and can sense transcendent truths when they are phrased in humanly-comprehensible terms.
God is perfect and so we would suppose that in a Transcendent sense, God has no needs – but we, though created in God’s image – do have needs. How is that, and why is it so?
Well, the sages taught ‘the Torah speaks in the language of Humanity’. Using such human-type phraseology to understand the Transcendent, we can say that in some sense God does have a need, and as we are created in God’s image, this need is in some sense reflected in ours. God has a need to give, and we have the need to receive what God wants to give.
It is in some sense like the ‘image’ in a mirror, we have the opposite complementary need, and so we are created by God to be in God’s ‘image’[1].
Another basic teaching of the Torah is that God created the universe from nothing, in other words it is not that the universe always existed, or that there was something co-existing with God, eternally, but rather there was only God and then God created the universe from nothing, since there was nothing before it[2].
Connecting the two above ideas, we can say that since there was only God at first, and God has no ‘need to receive’, it must be that the need to receive was created by God. Indeed, since the essence of the creation was so that beings would exist who needed to receive what God wanted to give, the essential ‘creation from nothing’ was the creation of this need to receive.
Since God created the universe in order to benefit Humanity, to give them delight, God created their need as a desire, with their delight being derived from the satisfaction of the desire. We can thus speak of God’s need to give a s a ‘desire to give’, and our human need as the image of this is ‘the desire to receive’, specifically to receive what God desire to give us.
As we all know from experience, the greater the desire, the greater is the delight upon satisfying the desire; thus in order to maximize the delight that humanity would achieve upon receiving what God desired to give, God created within humans a great desire to receive what God desired to give.
According to Kabbalah however, there is a problem - two entities can only connect when they have a ‘similarity of form’. And if the desire to give and the desire to receive are opposites, there is no connection between them, and a being wishing only to receive will not be able to do so from a being wishing only to give. Therefore, in order for humans to benefit from what God wishes to give, humans - though they are motivated by the desire to receive - must develop in themselves the desire ‘to receive in order to give’. In this way, they become desirous of giving, like God, and therefore they become similar to God, and therefore they can receive from God.
To sum it up: God desires to give, and humans desire to receive, but they can only receive what God desires to give if they develop in themselves the desire ‘to receive in order to give’.
A crucial aspect of this is that just as God’s desire to give meant creating the universe, so too Human development of the desire ‘to receive in order to give’ means taking actions, it is not just a mental activity of developing a desire. Indeed the way to actually develop this desire is via actions. One does not first engage in mental development to reach this stage of desiring to receive in order to give, and then undertake actions that express this, but rather the way to achieve this state is via actions, specifically the mitzvoth, both those between God and Humanity (Shabbat and holydays, food laws, purity etc) and those between people themselves (ethical action, social justice etc)[3].
The creation of beings where there were none before, and creating a new need, in some sense requires a ‘contraction’ of God, God went from ‘everything there is’ to ‘everything – the new beings and needs’. Abasic Kabbalistic teaching therefore is that the first step in the creation of the universe was therefore this ‘contraction’, to allow for the presence – the very existence – of the universe and humanity. We, as God’s image,must also as a first step ‘contract ourselves’, reduce our ego, make space for the existence of ‘the other’, and act from the principle of ‘love your fellow as you love yourself’. By taking real actions based on this we imitate God and become ‘alike’ and therefore become able to receive God’s munificence.
Another crucial element is that the motive for this undertaking must be the desire to please God, not the desire to receive from God.
A person who develops this desire to receive in order to give, and does so in order to please God, will achieve spirituality, and benefit from God’s ‘abundance’, the flow of God’s beneficience for which God created the universe and humanity.
Note: This path is only for those who truly love God and wish to connect to God, it is not for those who wish to achieve ends that are for their benefit - even if it is the satisfaction of being ‘the most spiritual being’ around, or in being the leader of the nation. In fact, as part of the development of the connection with God via the development of the desire to receive in order to give, through love of God rather than the desire for personal gain, whether in terms of fame, fortune, adulation is God’s requests to undertake actions that involve tremendous sacrifice, like the 10 tests of Abraham. Each test was calibrated to be more challenging than the previous one, in order to further refine Abraham’s soul. Seen from the outside, this is like God punishing a person for fulfilling God’s own request, or making requests that involve a person undertaking tremendous punishment. And then requesting again, and punishing upon successful fulfilment again, each time involving a more severe ‘punishment’. No human motivated by desire for personal gain – however ‘spiritual’-seeming that gain may be - would willingly undergo those types of test-purifications in order to reach the later stage of closeness to God that Abraham reached; such a person would quit the series of tests long before the 10th. Only someone motivated truly by a completely unselfish desire to receive in order to give, and by love of God rather than desire for personal gain will desire to undergo this type of testing-purification,
Note: The Torah teaches that God formed humanity via blowing the divine breath into a dirt-form. At a deeper level therefore, other than its fleshly aspect humanity is God. There is no true separation between humans and God, in fact no real existence of beings other than God. All was only God and all is still only God. The human task is to develop to the point where this is realized, via renouncing the ego and self-based needs, acting upon this, and thus bringing about a ‘reintegration’ so that there is again only God.
All the above was of course speaking in human terms, from the perspective in which we as humans have our own separate existence.
Desire to receive in order to give: actually ‘Lehashpiyah’, not to give
One never actually gets to the state of receiving in order to give (mashpiyah).
A tzadik renounces desire to receive, this is like dying since the essence of human life is to receive, then later has return of it, so this is considered ‘tchiyas hameysim’, and now is closer to level of “r in order to g”. The ‘4 worlds’ are states of being, we are born in state of asiyah, ari reached level of atzilus.
The universe and humanity continue forever, but we can’t understand these issues, they are beyond us, maybe when we are in higher states we can understand more.
These teachings were taught by the Ari but no one understood them. The sulam was his gilgul to explain it. Society, humanity had progressed by then to understand concepts of universality, human rights and dignity etc, and now can comprehend in a natural way the meaning of the teachings – that the ikkar is asiyah, mainly via ve’ahavta le’re’acha kamocha, which includes all humanity, that serving humanity is holiness. Also, to understand that the Jewish people must act as a nation to help the world understand these teachings and achieve the higher states ….
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My iidea after seeing R Brandwein writing first pafges/hearing lecture: old question is why a perfect god needed to create the world. Can answer ‘in order to give’, but that is a need too. So maybe an answer s that indeed god had this need to give, but the other side if need to receive, and this is human. So I am saying that the Sulam’s idea was mad eto follow from this: that the need to receive is what was created me’ayin, the rest is from what was already, yesh, the need to give. And we have to work our way up to the receiving in order to give, which is closest to being like god, and when we are most similar, that is when we can feel the most love from and too?and in spiritual sense, where there is no physical measure, being ‘close’ means being ‘like’, so being close to god means being like god in being all ab9out giving, not receiving.
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What about this is Rabbi Ashlag’s interpretation, what is from the Zohar, what would Rabbi Akiva have said about this? What do other respected Kabbalists of our ages have to say of this?
R Ashlag’s innovation: but is it really?
My question: what would rabbi akiva have said upon hearing that this was the essence of torah.’what does Rabbi B thing R Akiva would have taught then to this audience as the essence of torah,if difference, why?
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Is the reason for Rabbi Ashlag’s way my interp see below)
Rafi:
I w
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[1] There are several sense in which we are in God’s ‘image’, this is one of them 9Hebrew: Tzelem, dmut, are also for optical images: camera is matzlema in modern Hebrew, Dmut is for example the appearance of someone in artistic rendering).
[2] Without the connotation that there was time ‘before’ creation, time is part of the creation, but we of necessity must speak in human terms.
‘creation form nothing’ is in Hebrew ‘yesh me’ayin’. In classic Latin terminology this is translated as ‘ex-hihilo’.
[3] ‘ma hum rachum, af atah rachum….In Latin: Imitatio Dei