The Right Environment
The wisdom of Kabbalah teaches that if I place myself under the influence of a good environment, I adopt a desire for spirituality and the attainment of the purpose of creation. Such a desire would normally come only as a result of accumulated suffering over hundreds of years. However, through the positive influence of the environment, I can speed up the process significantly. That is the one freedom of choice that the Creator left me with – to choose for myself the right society.
Today, we need to build an environment that would pull us toward the purpose of creation and the attainment of the upper worlds more than ever before, because it is only through that kind of attainment that we can begin to manage our own destiny and save ourselves from the anticipated agony.
Question: Where in this world can I find such a society? Is there a society with the right conditions for this development?
Answer: The best is for a person to find a group that aims its aspirations to the goal of creation, and that would be able to influence him to prefer spiritual development to anything else.
In the Introduction to Talmud Eser Sefirot (Breaking the Iron Wall), the principal text for studying Kabbalah, Rabbi Yehuda Ashlag explains why the Kabbalists obligate each person to study Kabbalah, regardless of their age, sex or religious background: in the study of the Kabbalah there is a great strength that everyone should know about. A person who studies Kabbalah awakens on himself the affect of the upper light by simply wanting to understand what he is studying, although he still doesn’t understand it.
Rabbi Yehuda Ashlag writes (item 155): ”Therefore we must ask: why then, did the Kabbalists obligate each person to delve in the wisdom of Kabbalah? Indeed there is a weighty thing here, worthy of being publicized: that there is a magnificent, invaluable remedy, to those who delve in the wisdom of Kabbalah: that although they do not understand what they are learning, but through the yearning and the great desire to understand what they are learning, they awaken upon themselves the lights that surround their souls.
Meaning, that each man from Israel is guaranteed to finally attain all these wonderful attainments, which God has resolved, in the Thought of Creation…” That affect is based on the fact that before the decline of man’s soul to our world, it was filled with the upper light, but once it has descended and clothed in a body, the light that filled it remains in the upper world. And it is the same light that shines on it from above and wants to return to it and fill it. But that light can shine to the soul only in the amount that he studies the wisdom of Kabbalah, because Kabbalah is the way to fill the soul with light.
A person must attain the filling of his soul in one of his cycles. The desire of the soul to be filled with its former light is felt by man as various kinds of pain. The longer the time that passes without the filling with the light, the more intense the pains. The pains will ultimately bring a person to recognize their cause, being the need to be refilled with light, and will lead him to a desire to find a way to fill himself with the light – the method of Kabbalah.
When one turns to genuine sources of Kabbalah, a spiritual light from above begins to extend on him. When he practices the study in a group, with a teacher who is a Kabbalist, a collective spiritual force affects everyone, whose power is many times stronger than the light that shines on a single person. This way the group builds around it a ‘field’, a unique spiritual realm, while the group itself becomes an environment that grows a person toward the purpose of creation and safeguards him from all evil through this light.
There is no need to regret a lack of talent, being born in the wrong country, or into the wrong family – everyone has the best possible conditions for his spiritual development. In the next world no one will be able to say that he did not get the chance to attain perfection. There is only one factor that I can freely choose: I must create for myself the right environment.
That is why there are free beginner’s courses opening all over the world today, in order to build groups that study Kabbalah. All the Kabbalists in every generation worked this way. Each of these small groups will act as a small society and influence its members. In the future, these groups will grow into whole societies of people who practice Kabbalah. More and more people understand that there is no other way to be saved from the troubles but through the study of Kabbalah. These groups are the ones that will gradually formulate the new spiritual background of our society in Israel, and later on the in the whole world.