The Language of the Spiritual World
If even in the spiritual world, we are unable to express our emotions toward one another, how then can we use the language in order to describe spirituality? After all, the spiritual world is a world of desires, it occupies no space or time, only desires without any substance. In addition, Kabbalists tell us that those emotions are very precise and therefore demand a complete and accurate language in order to describe them.
How can we express in our language such accurate concepts such as subtle observations in Godliness? A description of the spiritual world is a description of man’s soul, a description of the phases of the adduction of the soul to the Creator, and the growing intensity of his emotions. Kabbalah divides the collective soul to parts, gives each part a name according to its attributes, and describes the relationships between them and the outer world.
That is the power of the language of Kabbalah. It describes emotions in an accurate manner that enables even the use of charts and graphs and formula. We might say that the wisdom of Kabbalah is the engineering of the soul. But how can we overcome the inaccuracies of our tongue so as to use it in such precise inquiries?
Try and give a unique mark to your mood, graphically compare it with someone else’s mood, express all the shades of your emotions in numbers: the dependency between the lack of confidence and fatigue, the mood when you feel hungry, the power of fears in the day time. We cannot accurately measure emotions in our world. For example, the relation between touching a warm body and the brain’s reaction to it, depends, among other things, on such factors as mood, condition of health, physical fitness and more. We cannot compare by percentage, or by quality of quantity, the pleasure we derive from music or a favorable dish. If our language is that poor, subjective and inaccurate, why did Kabbalists adopt it to describe the spiritual acts, and why did they not invent a special language, especially suited for that purpose?
In ordinary science for instance, misusing a term brings with it misunderstandings. An expert who knows the language of that science will not understand where the results were taken from and will relate to the conclusion as wrong, and a person who does not know that language will take it as truth and will make mistakes. The same applies to the wisdom of Kabbalah: when a person begins to describe things that seem to be happening in the spiritual worlds with words of our world, or makes up his own terms, we cannot speak of any level of credibility.
That is why Kabbalists chose the “language of the branches” to be the language of the Kabbalah. That language is based on the situation, that the whole creation in our world – still, vegetative, animate and speaking, and everything that happens to them in the past, present and future, and the whole creation as individual objects and their behaviors, all concatenate from the Creator and down through all the spiritual worlds, until they appear in our world. The leadership of all those things is constantly being renewed from upward downward until it comes to our world. Everything in our world necessarily begins with the upper world and then descends to our world degree after degree. Because everything in our world is a result of the upper world, there is a specific connection between the cause, being the root in the upper world, and the effect in our world. Kabbalists are those who find the connection between the root in the upper world and the branch in this world. They are those who can accurately say what connects with what, because they see the upper root, from which that connection comes, as well as the result of the upper root, the branch that unknowingly receives from the upper and is lead by it. Because of that Kabbalists can determine the roots by their corporeal consequences (branches) in our world.
That is why the Kabbalah received the name of “the language of the branches” and the name “the language of the roots”. The upper root is named after the branch and not the other way around. That way Kabbalists invent the language that accurately describes the spiritual world. It is the only language capable of connecting the spiritual world with our world in words we can understand.
From that stems a principle law in how to relate to the books of Kabbalah and the whole of the Torah: we must remember once and for all, that all the words in the books of Kabbalah are only words of our world, but not the interpretation that we are used to give it in our language. What stands behind those words are spiritual things, roots, that in no way belong to our world. We must always remember that, so as never to be confused.