Reading Kabbalistic Writings
“Question: If there are no words in spirituality, how do Kabbalists convey their attainments to one another and write books?
Answer: Kabbalists use what we call the language of branches. The spiritual world is the root, and from it we perceive some corporeal imprint in our corporeal senses that is called a branch.
Therefore we can describe spiritual phenomena even in our language, using this world’s words, because there is an outcome, a branch in the corporeal world for everything that exists in the spiritual world.
Suppose we are two Kabbalists. How can I tell you about the spiritual world if the spiritual consciousness and attainment are personal? I feel a certain picture, a form, a great world, an infinite reality that is revealed to me in all my senses in every direction, in every axis, and you feel something, too. How can we communicate and share our impressions?
The solution is actually in being here in our world, in our corporeal bodies. This is the reason that we can use our bodies to communicate with one another to write texts and to convey information even by clues or by a glance. This is the reason that we use our corporeal language.
In the spiritual world, for example, there are forces called a chair, a table, a cup, air, a wall, a window, and so forth.
We use these names in our world, but by using them, we refer to the internal essence of the concept in the spiritual world. I say “a window,” but I refer to a window that exists in the spiritual world, while you understand which window I refer to. I say “the window is open,” and you understand what the meaning of an open window is in the spiritual world, although I convey the idea to you by using corporeal words.
This is how Kabbalists speak, and this is how they write their books. This is called the language of the branches that is accepted by all Kabbalists. This is the language in which the Torah is written, but ordinary people don’t know that because Kabbalists wrote it in order to speak to one another about the spiritual world, while people think that it is about our world. This is the secret of the Torah.
Question: It turns out that when your read Kabbalah books, the words don’t mean anything to you unless you understand their double meaning.
Answer: That’s right. I read only these words because I know the language, but I don’t understand more than someone who doesn’t know Hebrew. What is more, if a person doesn’t know Hebrew, it is even better since then he is not confused and does not imagine different things about our world.”
From Rav Dr. Michael Laitman from KabTV’s “Encounters with Kabbalah” 7/7/15
Beyond the Words
There is a way to read that fills the mind with knowledge, and there is a way to read that opens the heart to another world.
When we open the writings of the great Kabbalists, we are not merely reading words written long ago. We are approaching the living heart of someone who has experienced a reality that remains hidden from us.
Every sentence carries something of that inner experience, something that words can barely contain.
And if we truly wish to receive it, we must learn to read differently.
Not with the restless mind that hurries to understand, classify, and remember, but with a heart longing to feel.
Entering the Heart of the Author
When a Kabbalist writes, he does not simply arrange ideas on paper. He attempts to transfer something that lives within him, something he has felt in his connection with the Upper Force.
The words are only the outer garments of that experience.
Our task is to pass through them.
We must read slowly enough to allow each word to awaken something within us. We must try to imagine what the author felt when those words emerged from his heart. What reality was he seeing? What filled him with wonder? What love, what yearning, what closeness was he struggling to express?
We should not rush to the next sentence before our heart has had a chance to enter the one before it.
For the purpose is not to finish the article. It is to come closer to the soul that wrote it.
From His Heart into Ours
There is an extraordinary possibility hidden within these writings.
Through the words, we can approach the author. Through the author, we can approach the spiritual reality he attained. And through that reality, we can begin to feel the One who awakened those sensations within him.
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A delicate chain of connection is formed, stretching from our heart through the heart of the Kabbalist toward the Creator.
But such a connection requires something from us.
We must be willing to become small.
Like an infant resting in its mother’s arms, knowing nothing of the world yet trusting completely in the one who holds it, we must approach the author with a willingness to receive.
Not to judge him. Not to measure his words against what we already know. Not to stand outside his experience and analyse it.
But to enter.
To become so deeply attached to his inner feeling that, for a moment, we forget our own thoughts and begin to live within his.
The Silence Between the Words
Perhaps the most precious moment in reading comes when we stop trying to understand.
When a sentence touches something deep within us, and we remain there.
We do not know exactly what we have received. We cannot explain it or give it a name. Yet something inside has moved.
A longing has awakened that was not there before.
We begin to sense how far we are from the world the author describes, and at the same time, how desperately we wish to enter it.
That longing is more precious than a thousand explanations.
Because the heart has begun to participate.
Reading Until the Distance Disappears
The greatness of these writings is not in their beautiful language or intellectual complexity. Their greatness lies in the spiritual life concealed within them.
A simple sentence written from genuine attainment may contain more than volumes of brilliant explanations.
What matters is not how much we understand, but how deeply we wish to connect with the one who understood.
And perhaps one day, as we read, the words will no longer feel like something coming from outside us.
The author’s yearning will become our yearning. His longing for bestowal will awaken the same longing within us. His love will touch something in our hearts that has been waiting silently for this moment.
Then we will understand why these writings were given to us.
Not simply to tell us about the spiritual world, but to help us approach it through the heart of someone who has already entered.
The deepest reading is not when we understand what the author wanted to say, but when we begin to feel what he felt.
And through that feeling, heart touching heart across the distance of time, we may discover that the words were never the destination.
They were only the doorway.
