Archives: VOD

Most of us grew up hearing about the ten commandments as instructions given by God to us humans so that we would be moral to each other. But is that what the ten commandments really mean? According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, the ten commandments mean something else entirely. Some of us might try to observe the ten commandments, and find that we can observe some of them, but fail on others. Some of us simply forget about these commandments, filing them away among several Bible stories we learned in our childhood. According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, we do not and cannot observe any of the ten commandments until we attain the spiritual levels that these commandments speak of. As with all the Bible stories, the wisdom of Kabbalah describes their spiritual roots, which have no corporeal forms, images, or personalities connected to them. The ten commandments thus describe nothing in our world, but rather certain limitations that we apply to our nature—the desire to enjoy—in order to adhere to the spiritual world. When we apply these limitations, then our desire to enjoy becomes suitable to dress the ten spiritual qualities called “the ten Sefirot,” which is what the kabbalists originally intended as the ten commandments. A commandment, which in Hebrew is “Dover,” stems from the Hebrew root of the word “utterance” (“Dibur”), which is born in the Peh (mouth) of the Partzuf (spiritual entity), known in Kabbalah as the “Peh de Rosh” (i.e., the place in our soul where we act on our decision to resemble the spiritual quality of love, bestowal and connection, and which receives the ability to love and bestow according to the strength of the intention to bestow). These actions are performed in the world of Atzilut, the highest of the spiritual worlds that is closest to the pure quality of love and bestowal, the Creator’s quality. We receive the ten commandments only after connecting to each other “as one man with one heart” in order to rise above the raging egoistic desires that resist the connection, and which make us divisive and hateful of one another. That massive egoistic quality is represented in the Bible story by Mount Sinai (“Sinai” from the Hebrew word for “hatred” [“Sinah”]). If we fail to positively connect to each other in order to rise above the ego that divides us, then we also cannot discover or observe any of the ten commandments. We have to be on a spiritual level of attainment, namely the level of “Bina,” one of the ten Sefirot which represents the pure quality of bestowal, in order to have the ear (Bina is the spiritual root of our sense of hearing) to hear the ten utterances from Mount Sinai. In other words, we need to attain a certain level of equivalence of form with the spiritual quality of love and bestowal (the Creator) in order to observe the ten commandments. We can reach a spiritual level where we discover and observe the ten commandments by first undergoing a preparation period in this world. Our main emphasis in this preparation period should be to achieve a positive connection with one another “as one man with one heart,” which will enable us to observe the ten commandments. If we fail to reach such a level of connection among each other, then we will lack the ability to perceive, sense, and observe these commandments. In short, “love your neighbor as yourself” is the foundation of all spiritual attainment and ascent to a spiritual level, and when we attain a certain spiritual level, we find ourselves living according to a set of limitations called “the ten commandments.”

How do you define the part in you that can develop into ten Sefirot? What are the ten Sefirot that you can develop into? Also, once you define how to develop your ten Sefirot, what are the key stages in such a process of development? Our matter is a desire to receive pleasure, while our physical body is nothing more than an animal. We sometimes feel our desires through the physical body, i.e., those for food, sex, and family, and sometimes through a more inner body—desires for money, honor, control, and knowledge. The first group of desires (food, sex, and family), are individual desires belonging to our physical body. Our social desires for money, honor, control, and knowledge follow them, which involve interaction with others, yet which still differ from an even higher level of desire that we have yet to come to terms with. The latter desire is a spiritual one, and when it surfaces, we feel attracted to a new unknown “something” on one hand, and that all the previous levels of desire cannot ultimately fulfill us, on the other hand. In the wisdom of Kabbalah, the spiritual desire is called a “point in the heart.” It is characterized by questioning the meaning and purpose of our lives, why things are the way they are, and whether we can influence our fate. The point in the heart creates new poles of positive and negative, plus and minus within us. Where we once lived, survived, and thrived solely according to our individual and social desires, where we pictured fulfillments at the levels of food, sex, family, money, honor, control, and knowledge as the “positive” pole of our lives that we aspired to, when the point in the heart emerges, we naturally feel that as much as those desires can fulfill us, they cannot fulfill a deeper and more internal part of us that demands meaning and purpose, and we thus feel their transient fulfillments as a “negative” or “minus” pole in relation to our newfound spiritual aspiration that demands something more meaningful and even eternal. The wisdom of Kabbalah was made for fulfilling the deeper and more inner need of the spiritual desire, where it defines the spiritual goal and provides a method for how to attain it. By spiritually advancing using the method of Kabbalah, we learn how to simultaneously take the reins of a new positive/plus pole in reality—the spiritual quality that we can gradually attain likeness to, which is where we learn how to access and illuminate the ten Sefirot of our soul—as well as the negative/minus pole, in reality, our constantly growing desires to receive pleasure. By taking these reins, we learn how to create a positive/plus level, and develop our connection with the ten Sefirot more and more above an increasing negative/minus, adding a whole new level of depth to our perception and sensation of reality, all the way up to a point where we feel no end to our fulfillment and exist in a consciously-attained eternity and harmony. Also, the more we develop the positive/plus of the point in the heart in relation to the negative/minus of our corporeal desires, then we eventually start seeing how our ten Sefirot all interact as a single system of eternal consciousness throughout all the levels, from the point in the heart connecting to the highest Sefira of Keter, all the way through to our desires to receive becoming the lowest Sefira of Malchut.