A Pyramid within a Pyramid
The reason why Abraham was the only one of his generation to discover life’s creative force is that he was a piece of Adam’s Partzuf that was ready to reveal it. But the goal of Creation is not for only one person to achieve the Creator-like state, but for allof humanity to achieve it. Hence, Abraham's discovery was not a one-time-thing, but an antecedent to a new stage in the spiritual evolution of humanity.
Abraham realized that life is a pyramid whose peak is the Creator’s trait of bestowal. He also realized that human desires would only intensify, as they have done since the dawn of Creation. And finally, Abraham knew that this awareness, along with having the correction method provided by Kabbalah, were the only ways to avert the collapse of the system due to the heightening egoism. But in the absence of tangible proof, only a handful followed Abraham and united around the goal of attaining the Creator. When those who went with him grew and became a nation, they were named after their goal: Ysrael (Israel), from the Hebrew words Yashar El (Straight to God).
Historically, Babel did not collapse immediately or even soon after Abraham's departure. It continued to fluctuate in dominance and prominence for more than a millennium following his leave, including the resettlement of Hebrews in Babel after their exile following the ruin of the First Temple. However, from the spiritual, Kabbalistic perspective, Nimrod’s triumph in Babel sealed its doom because it perpetuated the rule of egoism rather than altruism.
The Cure that Wasn’t
In truth, Abraham's method was very simple: in the face of heightened egoism, unite and thus discover the quality of bestowal—the Creator. As we have been showing throughout the book, every element in nature behaves in this way. The initial levels of desire to receive require very limited organization and form small systems where each element dedicates itself to its host system. We call these elementary systems, “atoms.” The more evolved levels of desires place atoms within systems we call “molecules.” As the desire evolves further, these systems organize within even bigger systems called “cells.” These group into multicellular creatures, finally leading to the creation of plants, animals, and humans.
In all of this, there is only one principle: the desire to receive in all the elements wishes to receive, and the only way to create balance and sustainability in the system is to unite under a higher-level system. This is what Abraham's method sought to consciously emulate.
As we have said, the desire to receive in humans becomes egoism because of our sense of uniqueness. Hence, the antidote to egoism is the exact same cure applied by Nature—the construction of a system to which all parts will contribute and yield their self-interests. In return, the system will guarantee the well-being and sustainability of its elements. Scientists today wish to discover the conditions that existed in the early universe by recreating those conditions on a miniature scale in facilities such as the CERN Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Similarly, by imitating Nature’s “natural” conduct, we will discover its law of bestowal.
In truth, the modus operandiis really quite simple: If you think like a giver and act like a giver, we have to at least consider the possibility that you have a small amount of giving in your nature, to paraphrase Douglas Adam’s celebrated quote from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency [94].
However, Nature does not provide us with the instincts to emulate it, as it does with the rest of its elements. Because we are meant to be its rulers, our task is to study these rules by ourselves and subsequently implement them. This is why, when Nimrod expelled Abraham, the only man who could teach this rule to the Babylonians, he also denied his people the method of achieving unity—the one antidote to the growing egoism and alienation among his people.
Following Abraham's departure, Babel continued extolling self-centered abandon. But although pleasure and enjoyment do not contradict the purpose of Creation—as we know from Stages Three and One, which received the Creator’s pleasure—receiving pleasure is neither the ultimate goal nor the greatest delight. Man’s greatest delight and ultimate goal are to become like the Creator, and the Babylonians’ negation of that goal is what ultimately ruined them. While Israel was forming into a nation, as described in Chapter 1, Babel experienced violent vacillations as the unbridled egoism of its people intensified. Its final disintegration in the 4th century B.C. proved a long, yet unavoidable process.
Yet, Babel was only the first stage in building the highest level in the pyramid of desires—the speaking level. As with all other elements in Creation, the final level in the pyramid consists of a root and four stages of evolving desires. Abraham is considered the Root Stage, hence his epithet, Avraham Avinu (Abraham Our Patriarch), referring to him being the progenitor of the nation that strived to reach the Creator. Later, as we know, he became known as the father of all three Abrahamic faiths, the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
As desires kept evolving in humanity, a new level of desire in the pyramid emerged atop the Root level, approximately when Egypt was in its prime. This level corresponded to Stage One, and as the Root Stage had its harbinger, Abraham, Stage One had a harbinger of its own, Moses. And just as Abraham was forced by Nimrod to exit Babel, Moses had to flee Pharaoh and exit Egypt, as described in the Pentateuch, “But Moses fled from the face of Pharaoh, and dwelt in the land of Midian” (Exodus 2:15). To understand the importance of Moses’ mission, we need to understand a concept that initially appears to be unrelated—the concept of free choice, as explained by Kabbalah.
Free Choice
As already discussed, the evolution of humanity corresponds to Stage Four in the evolution of desires. In this stage, the desire to receive realizes that behind all that occurs is a thought, a purpose that dictates this series of changes. In our lives, this translates into a child’s drive to not only emulate its parents’ actions, but to wish to know what they know.
To obtain the Creator’s thought, Stage Four needs freedom of thought and freedom of will so it can develop its perceptions independently. Similarly, if you teach a child to think and view the world through a narrow perspective, he will make a very loyal soldier, but probably not a great strategist or general. This, also, is the reason why children—especially in early childhood, before we accustom them to indolence—wish to do things by themselves instead of letting their parents do it for them.
Thus, the need for free choice requires our ignorance of the law by which all creatures achieve balance and sustainability through yielding self-interest to the interest of the host system, so that we can discover it for ourselves. If we knew that this was the law in effect, and that it is as rigid as the law of gravity, we would not dare defy it. And if we had no choice but to follow it, we would, at best, become obedient children, but we would remain children, forever inferior to the desire to give that created that law.
To equal the Creator, we must learn how to “build” Creation by ourselves, every element within it, the reason for its existence, how and when it emerged, and if and when it will expire. To learn that, evolution has created the perfect infrastructure for our learning: it has built a universe in which every element abides by the law of yielding self-interest in favor of the system’s interest. Additionally, evolution denied us the knowledge of this law, and gave us the power to act contrary to it, or not, depending on our choice. And most of all, evolution did not reveal to us the reward for observing this law.
Cells in the body sympathize with the life of their host organism, not their own. If this were not so, they wouldn’t be able to operate in its favor and would become malignant or even prevent the initiation of life altogether. This sympathy is so complete that cells are even willing to terminate their own lives to promote the growth of the entire body in a process known as “apoptosis” or “Programmed Cell Death” (PCD). In embryos, for example, the embryo’s shape of feet is determined by apoptosis, which finalizes the differentiation of fingers and toes when cells between the fingers are deliberately put to death by their host organism.
In return for the cells’ sympathy, they are “rewarded” with the perception of the world of their host organism, instead of their own. That is, cells behave as though they are equipped with an innate perception of the entire organism of which they are parts. If they did not function in this way, they would instinctively try to fight their neighboring cells for supply of nutrients and oxygen, as do unicellular creatures. When such a malfunction occurs in a cell within an organism, this can develop into cancer.
If we, like cells in an organism, could sympathize with our host system—Planet Earth—but even more than that, with the forces that built and sustain the Earth, we would obtain the broadest possible perception and transcend such concepts as time, space, and life and death as we know them. Our perception would reveal that we are part of a much broader system than our immediate surroundings, just as cells are part of the entire organism. In that state, we would be able to think and act as the Creator—the desire to give. And in achieving this, we would achieve the purpose of Creation—becoming Creator-like.
Yet, if we could see that by yielding our self-interest we are rewarded with being Creator-like, we would do it in order to receive pleasure, without the aim to give, and without the aim to give we would remain self-centered, disparate from the Creator. To achieve a Creator-like state, we must choose it freely, without being lured in any way toward altruism. Because, as we explained about the four stages, the aim to give is what makes us Creator-like, the desire to receive must not feel that we will receive pleasure or benefit in giving, so it would not create selfish motivation.
When we understand that, we will understand how important the restriction of pleasure by Stage Four is to us. If Stage Four did not repel it, we would succumb to the pleasure just as a baby enjoys its parents’ strength and benevolence toward it, and we would not be able to become like the Creator. Instead, we would be taken by the pleasure, just as moths are lured by the light of a lamp on a dark night.
In the Face of Evolving Desires—Unite
Earlier, we said that when desires evolve in Nature, they create increasingly complex structures. Each new level rises to a higher degree of desire to receive when creatures of the current level join to form an aggregate of collaborators. By so doing, the creatures of the current (and presently highest) level create a system to which they can yield their self-interests, which provides them with sustainability and adherence to Nature’s law of giving. When this happens in humans, we, too, start from the smallest structure—a single person—and work our way toward increasingly complex societies. The only difference is that we must create these social structures that adhere to the law of giving by ourselves.
Abraham’s family was actually the first group to create that system, and then harness its members into a system whose parts were united by dedication to their host system. As Maimonides narrates (Chapter 1), this initial system grew into a group. Yet, only in Egypt—when their number sufficed—did the system grow into a nation. When Moses brought Israel out of Egypt, the family of seventy that had gone into Egypt now consisted of several millions (there are many views on precisely how many came out of Egypt, but the common figures are between 2 and 6 million men, women, and children, excluding the mixed multitude).
Clearly, Moses’ job was far more challenging than Abraham’s. He could not gather the entire nation in his tent, as did Abraham with his family and few disciples, and teach them the laws of life. Instead, he gave them what we refer to as the Five Books of Moses, known in Hebrew as the Torah, which means both “Law” (of bestowal) and “Light.” In his books, Moses provided depictions of all the states that one experiences on the way to becoming like the Creator.
The first part of the way to emulating the Creator was to exit Egypt, venture into the Sinai Wilderness, and stand at the foot of Mount Sinai. According to ancient sources, the name, “Sinai,” comes from the Hebrew word, Sinaa (hatred) [95]. In other words, Moses gathered the people at the foot of Mount Sinai—the mountain of hatred.
To interpret the mountain-of-hatred allegory, Moses' teachings showed the people how hateful they were towards each other, how remote they were from the law of bestowal. To reconnect with the law of bestowal, or the Creator, they united, as described by 11th century commentator and Kabbalist, Rashi, “As one man in one heart.” [96]
Baal HaSulam elaborates on this process in his essay, “The Mutual Guarantee,” [97] where he explains that in return for their pledge to care for each other, Moses’ people were given the Torah. They attained the law of bestowal and obtained the light, the altruistic nature of the Creator. In Baal HaSulam’s words, “Once the whole nation unanimously agreed and said, ‘We shall do and we shall hear,’ …only then did they become worthy of receiving the Torah, and not before.” [98]
Now we can see how important Moses’ mission was, and why free choice is a prerequisite to accomplishing it. The leaders of Abraham's group were all family and were naturally united. But Moses had to unite a nation. To achieve that, the entire nation had to agree on a path. By making a free choice to unite, despite the evident egoism (allegorically described as “standing at the foot of Mount Sinai”), a nation was admitted into the law of giving. This was the first time in the history of humanity that people en masse attained the quality of the Creator, and from this point forward, choosing unity in the face of growing egoism will be the only way to achieve the Creator.
The Other Way
The sages of the Talmud wrote, “One who has one hundred, wishes for two hundred.” [99] Since the dawn of Kabbalah, its practitioners stated that our desires evolve. They grow in both intensity and quality, meaning not just how much we want, but also what we want. Eventually, these desires evolve to become the ultimate desire—to be like the Creator.
But Kabbalists have also stated that we have free choice in how we arrive at the greatest desire, which also yields the greatest pleasure. They said that there are two ways to reach this goal.
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We follow Moses’ example and unite. We do that by studying how Nature works at its most fundamental levels, how we, being offshoots of the law of Nature operate, and then try to work like Nature, in unity, just as a child imitates its parents.
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We ignore the available information and try to discover the secret to a good and sustainable life by ourselves. This can be compared to a child sitting behind the wheel of a car but is too small to see out the window. Naturally, this will result in recurring accidents with horrific consequences.
Kabbalists called the first, enlightened way, “The Path of Light,” and the second, torturous way, “The Path of Suffering.” [100]
The evolution of desires occurs irrespective of our choices. When it is not accompanied by a calculated effort to unite and to choose the path of light in order to discover the law of giving, there is nothing to regulate the growing desire and funnel it in constructive directions. The result is increased and unchecked egoism. This is usually accompanied by “an accident”—disintegration and defeat as it happened in Babylon and in Egypt.
Indeed, the history of the Israeli nation is the best example of this statement. As long as they followed Abraham's teaching, they succeeded. When they did not, they were defeated and exiled.
Approximately 1,900 years ago, a new level of desire to receive emerged. This required a renewed effort and a renewed choice to unite. Yet, the people of Israel were not ready to make the effort. Instead, they fell into hatred and egoism. The Babylonian Talmud, written around the 5th century C.E., explains that the sole reason for the defeat of Israel and the ruin of the Temple was unfounded hatred. [101]
Since that ruin, the world has had only one path to tread—the path of suffering. The path of light was known to very few individuals in the generations that followed, and every few decades they would warily try to expose it. But seeing that people were not yet ready to contemplate the truths that that path held about reality, they kept it to themselves and to those rare devoted students who sought the truth at all cost.
Yet, as we will see in the next chapter, the years of obliviousness to Kabbalah were not in vain. They have given us much knowledge and myriad observations of Nature as a whole, and of human nature in particular. Without those years, the resumption of acceptance of the knowledge that Kabbalah provides would not be possible.
[94] Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (NY: Pocket Books, 1987), 270
[95] Midrash Rabbah, Shemot 2:4
[96] RASHI commentary on exodus 19:2
[97] Ashlag, The Arvut (The Mutual Guarantee), in Kabbalah for the Student, 251
[98] (ibid.)
[99] Midrash Rabbah, Kohelet, 1:13
[100] Ashlag, Kabbalah for the Student, 54
[101] Babylonian Talmud, Masechet [.Tractate.] Yoma p 9b