About “the Language of the Branches”
Q: You wrote in one of your articles: “There is a singular, reciprocal link between a spiritual root and a corporeal branch.” How does that mesh with the fact that there are a great many languages in the world, and only the Hebrew language is the one that creation leans on? Are all other languages an incorrect reflection of the spiritual world?
A: You will be able to find a detailed explanation in The Study of the Ten Sefirot, Part I - Inner Reflection.
A language is only a printout of information that is absorbed in a vessel and felt in it as an action of the Light, the pleasure. In fact, we have no real need for any language because we already have those sensations within us.
However, when we want to convey our feelings to others, we need to present them in a form that would be understood by the person we want to speak to about our feelings. That form is called a “language,” and it doesn’t matter what language is used. Kabbalists chose Hebrew and through it they conveyed the information desired. They also made use of Aramaic, which was a spoken language in ancient Persia.
The Book of Zohar also uses foreign (Greek) words that were used very freely in Israel, so we, like the Kabbalists, use them as well. I, too, asked my rabbi that same question, and he said that any language can be modified to convey spiritual information, but since Kabbalists described everything in Hebrew, they built a dictionary - “the link between the root and the branch” - that today is the basis for this whole science.
The Hebrew language is also called the “holy tongue” because it leads to holiness, to the attributes of the Creator.
Now, there still remains the question why, until today, Kabbalists were either Jews or people who converted to Judaism (proselytes). The reason lies in the uniqueness of their souls. The collective soul of “Adam” consists of 600,000 parts, or 600,000 souls, separated by the intensity of their will.
Before the sin of the first man, every desire was aimed at pleasing the Creator; each was a desire to give to the Creator. But as a result of the sin of the First Man, desires changed from “pleasing the Creator” to pleasing themselves. This is called “a fall” from a spiritual degree to a corporeal one; from an aim to give to an aim to receive.
Before the collective soul was broken, all its parts (souls) were connected by a single intent - “for the Creator.” After the breaking, each part that departed from the soul acquired the intent “for itself,” and the parts were separated. Now, they cannot understand or feel one another.
The correction of the souls is focused on changing the intent from “for myself” to its former state of “for the Creator.” It is a gradual process. Souls are separated from one another by the intensity of their desire. The smaller the desire, the easier it is to change the intent. Therefore, the correction begins with the smallest desires and ends with the greatest.
All desires, in the order of their correction, form a line or a chain: the smallest desires come first, then the greater ones. They are generally divided into two groups: “Galgalta VeEynaim” (GE) and “Awzen, Hotem, Peh” (AHP). At first, the GE are corrected and then come the AHP. Souls (desires) that are related to GE are called “Jews”; souls (desires) that are related to AHP are called “Gentiles.”
Souls dress in corporeal bodies in our world. Therefore, there are groups of people in our world that connect by the types of their soul and their desires (in fact, this is how nations and peoples are formed). Because the Jews must be the first to correct, there is pressure on them from Above, by the Upper Guidance - the Creator - in order to bring them to correction. The Creator uses all the means of this world (see Introduction to the Zohar, item 66 through the end).
Because the souls that are called “Jews” must be corrected before all other souls, then in our world, in groups of people with a Jewish type of soul there are Kabbalists. Those are people who came out to the spiritual world and express their impressions and the method of correction in their own mother tongue. That is why Kabbalah is expressed in the language of the Jews.