Insights into Rabbi Ashlag's Kabbalah podcast Yedidah Cohen

The Torah is not a history book. The outer events of our forefathers’ lives are recorded in the Torah. But the meaning of these events and the intentions of the protagonists are recorded in the inner aspect of the Torah, the Zohar. It’s when we put the inner intentions together with the events that we begin to understand why these stories are important for us today in living our own lives. In this shiur we will look at one example in which Yaakov teaches us how to handle our own selfishness and ego, before we going to do a mitzvah and how we need to relate to it after the mitzvah by looking at the story of his relationship with both Laban and Esau.

We think it is ourselves that think our thoughts, but Rabbi Yehudah Leib Ashlag tells us that this is a delusion. In actual fact it is God who sends us our thoughts in order to communicate with us, giving, uniquely and intimately, his love to each one of us. Whether our thoughts are positive or negative they all come from him. And thus we actually have an open channel of communication with the Creator of all the universe . This should bring us to feel great joy and thanks.

When travelling in Jerusalem today, we see a thriving city. The elderly sit with their staffs in their hands and the children play in the streets, fulfilling the prophecy of Zechariah made 2000 years ago. So why should we mourn on Tisha b Av today? The Zohar teaches us that the inner meaning of Jerusalem is the point of holiness in our heart. On Tisha BAv we need to take stock and mourn that the consciousness of God is so low on our own personal agenda and on that of the world. It is our mourning for the consciousness of God in our lives that helps us realize how much we desire and long for the rebuilding of our inner Jerusalem.

The Zohar teaches us that the essence of the Torah, the essence of God, and the essence of the soul are one.

But we cannot attain the essence of God directly —even the essence of ourselves, our soul, also is hidden from us. So the one aspect of this godly essence that we are given as a gift to grasp and to attain, is the Torah. When we learn , immerse ourselves, in the Torah we are connecting directly the Holy blessed One, and with our own soul. And this is the great gift that we are given every Shavuot , to renew our connection with the Divine essence.

But we’re not just a soul, we are also made up of the body. These two components, while they need each other , also oppose each other. Our body aspect ,our egoism tells us, “whatever you do, to better yourself in the material sense, or whatever actions you take which increase your importance are good. “

Whereas the soul, says, “whatever we can do in giving unconditionally, whether to God or to our fellow human being, is good, because such actions bring us close to God.

Our body aspect is more familiar to us: it starts to grow the moment we are born , whereas our soul incarnates later. The voice of the ego is strident , fitting in with the messages we get from the society around us and the media, whereas the soul whispers and we have to strain to hear its voice. So how are we going to want to contact the soul? How are we going to decide that the yetzer hara, our evil inclination, is really our worst enemy ? How are we going to want the Torah the connection with our soul?

In this podcast we study a beautiful article of Rabbi Baruch Shalom Ashlag in which he shows us that it is God who came down on Mount Sinai to show us the reality of our own egoism , so we will want to receive the Torah again with all our heart.

When we first look at the Haggadah, it seems to be a collection of somewhat disconnected paragraphs, with the overall motif being the story of the Children of Israel coming out of Egypt. But when we use knowledge gained from the Zohar and the teachings of Rabbi Ashlag we discover that the Haggadah is really a meditation on the inner meaning of exile and redemption, as the Haggadah oscillates from light to darkness and back to light again. It is not describing events of 3000 years ago, but relates to our own inner exile and the redemption by God for each one of us on this holy night. One of the most enigmatic parts of the Haggadah is the story of the four sons. We will use this part of the Haggadah to hear the voice of God calling to us and to examine our possible responses.

Rabbi Ashlag, in a letter to his students, points out the cause of the exile of the Children of Israel in Egypt. He shows that this very same cause operates in ourselves today causing us to become disempowered. It is our disconnection with the soul within us that enables us to become easy prey to fears and worries. When we reconnect value the soul within us as our own inner Sage, we reconnect with the God within us, and we leave our inner exile and come to our state of redemption.