The Beginning of Wisdom is Silence

One day, the Rabbi was asked to explain who should be allowed to learn the Hidden Wisdom.

"There are several schools of thought," he explained, "Some teach that only men over the age of 40 should learn. Others say that teaching women is forbidden. Yet others claim that only those well versed in the Talmud should be allowed to ender the Garden."

He remained silent for a while to let us think about what he had said, then continued, "Listen to me closely. The Wisdom is there for all, men and women, young and old, learned and ignorant. There is only one pre-requisite for learning the Kabala and that is a desire to learn. It is not necessary to understand anything at all when being introduced to the first levels, since the student is only drinking from the well of knowledge to satisfy an instinctive thirst that he or she doesn't understand yet. The thirst is known…yet not understood. They are much like nursing babies who don't understand either the source of their nourishment, or how it will be absorbed into their bodies.

"They only know that they are thirsty. The light of the Ain Sof responds to that thirst like a Mother…giving freely and nurturing all who search for it, unlimited in its ability to quench thirst. For this reason, I never search for students. A student must come to me, as a wanderer in the desert to a cool spring, drinking instinctively from the life giving waters without questioning or understanding anything beyond that basic need. Only later, when he has quenched his thirst, will he be called upon to transfer this hidden wisdom to others.

"If he doesn't share with others, he will explode from selfishly retaining the unending wisdom, and will be forced return to the same shattered un-enlightenment that drove him to the well in the first place.

"So the desire to receive should be in order to give or influence…and the timing of this step is critical to the student, since it must happen when he is full almost to the brim, but before his 'container' bursts."

It took me awhile to formulate my question. "How do you know when to reject a person who comes to you to learn ?

"A true seeker doesn't come to me with pre-conceived notions of Kabala, re-incarnation, ego or a desire to change the physical by using the meta-physical. As I said before, the true student comes because of a thirst, which he or she, cannot identify. A false student will always try to teach rather than learn, to influence rather than be influenced, to assert his or her own ego rather than to receive, to tell rather than to ask.

"They never seem to learn that the beginning of wisdom is silence."

From the Teacher to David: God is Everything and Everything is in God

"Teacher" I said, "If God is everything and everything is in God, and, as we learn God is good…what then is evil? Where did it come from?"

"If I give you your hearts desire, you will call me "good"…and if I strike you, then you will call me "evil," he said patiently. "But here in this world you define good and evil by what affects you subjectively. The Wise have always said that God is not confined by our view of good and evil, and He cannot be defined by the limits of our mind."

"If so, Teacher," I said, "What then is evil and how did it come into the world? What then is Satan…what are angels, devils…?"

He held up his hand for me to be silent and continued, "The Torah says, "And God said, 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.' And later, 'So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.'

"The Hebrew, as you know, reads נעשה אדם בצלמנו, which comes from the source צלם or image, but the root of this word is צל , which means shadow or shade. This is what man is: not the image of God as we understand an image, or a copy…but a shadow or shade of God, not equal to God, but still capable of being God-like and capable of creating within the limitations of our collective being.

"We create "good" in this world and we also create "evil." We create devils but we can also create angels. Satin is simply the collective embodiment of man's failure to use the incredible unlimited energy of the Creator to fill the universe with light and we chose to keep this light or energy to ourselves. This perversion of the creative force granted to man is the cause for the "breaking of the vessel" which we talked about before. This inevitably leads to waste, ecological crises, famine, injustice, war, death, and destruction. These become the crippled children of our collective being.

"We were given the power to create, within the boundaries of this, our test-tube world, and the collective "we" chose ego and self gratification over everything else…the desire to receive for the sake of receiving…and thus we created what we now call "evil."

"Our salvation will come because our soul recognizes this creation of our as being out of harmony with the universe and just as we have created "evil" we can also strive to create "good." This also is the first step in "repairing of the vessel.". We do so by striving to fill our creation with empathy and love until this collective effort will channel the unlimited energy of the Creator into everything and everyone, and we return to the garden.