The Birth of the People of Israel
For the correction method to appear today and lead the world to equilibrium with Nature, it had to be passed on and developed from generation to generation. It is a process that began in the same group of Kabbalists that Abraham began, and has stretched over thousands of years.
After using Abraham’s method for several generations, the intensified ego appeared in his group, too. In that state, to cope with the new egoism, it needed to find a higher level of the method of achieving balance with Nature.
The provider of this new method was Moses, the great Kabbalist of that time. Moses led the people out of Egypt, out of the domination of the new ego, and taught them to be “as one man in one heart,” as parts of a single body. Because of its size, this group was now called “a people” or “a nation.” However, genetically, it was part of the ancient Babylonian people to which Abraham belonged, as even science confirms today [21].
Moses’ method of balancing with Nature was a continuation of Abraham’s method. It was named “The Torah.” This does not refer to the Torah (Pentateuch) as a historic document, as we know it today, but as a method for correcting the ego. The term, “Moses,” symbolizes the force that pulls (Moshech, in Hebrew) one out of the ego’s rule. The term, “Torah,” comes from the word, “instruction” or “light,” the force that corrects, as in, “The Light in it reformed them” (Midrash Raba, Eicha, Introduction, 2nd paragraph). Torah also stands for the pleasure that fills one who has corrected one’s ego.
Thus, the group of Kabbalists continued to evolve. Implementing Moses’ method, they corrected all the egoistic desires that surfaced in them, and the filling (satisfaction, light) they received within their corrected desires was called Beit ha Mikdash (The Temple, The House of Holiness). The Temple is their corrected desires, which has now become a house filled with holiness; i.e., the quality of altruism, the quality of the comprehensive Nature.
As children were born, they were raised by the correction method and achieved their own spiritual attainments. Thus the people lived within the sensation of the common, collective Nature, until the ego jumped one more degree, causing them to lose that sensation. The detachment from the sensation of the inclusive Nature is called “the ruin of the Temple,” and the new domination of the ego is called “the exile in Babylon.”
The correction of the ego that erupted at the ruin of the First Temple was called “the return from the exile in Babylon and the erection of the Second Temple.” However, this time the nation had been split in two: some succeeded in correcting their egos; others were overpowered by their egos and could not correct them. The ego gradually grew among the first group, too, until the entire nation lost the sensation of the inclusive Nature, and the people fell into spiritual concealment. This domination of the ego was called “the ruin of the Second Temple,” and the people went on another exile, which was to be their last.
The ruin of the altruistic quality caused the entire nation to lose the sensation of the comprehensive Nature, except for a chosen few, the Kabbalists, who live in every generation. Away from the public’s eye, these Kabbalists continued to develop the method to correct human nature and to adapt it to the growing ego. Their task was to prepare the method for a time when Israel and humanity would need it.
[21] A. Nebel, D. Filon, B. Brinkmann, PP. Majumder, M. Faerman, A. Oppenheim, The Y chromosome pool of Jews as part of the genetic landscape of the Middle East, The American Journal of Human Genetics, 2001, 1095112:(5) 69.