Read Baal HaSulam's Introduction to Zohar in source order, passage by passage, with the close English translation where available and the original source text for checking.
Questions and Inquiries In this introduction [to Kabbala], I would like to clarify certain ideas that might seem simple. People mention ideas, and much ink has been spilled explaining those ideas, but people do not clearly and properly understand them.
• What is our role in this great chain of being, of which each of us is but a small link?
• When we examine ourselves, we feel that we are defective and low. There is little more despicable than we are. When we examine the Maker who made us, we ought to be superior and perfect, as a perfect Maker ought to make perfect things.
• Logic dictates that God is the Great Benefactor, and none are greater than Him. Why has He created so many creatures who suffer and experience lack during their existence? Good desires to bestow good, and certainly not to generate so much suffering.
• How is it possible that from the Eternal, which has no beginning nor end, will emanate creatures that come into being, cease to be, and are lowly?
To adequately explain all of this, we must initially make certain inquires. [These inquiries are] not regarding forbidden things, such as God’s essence, of which we have no knowledge whatsoever and about which we can neither think nor say anything. Instead, [we should inquire] about those matters that we are commanded to study: namely, God’s actions. As the Torah commands: “Know the God of your father and serve Him” (I Chr. 28:9), and as it is also stated in Shir HaYiḥud (for Thursday): “You [God] are known through your actions.”
The first inquiry is: How can we imagine a genuinely new creation, something created that was not already contained within God prior to Creation? After all, it is clear to anyone who investigates that there is nothing that is not already included within Him. Furthermore, it is evident that nothing can produce what is not already contained within it.
The second inquiry is: Let us grant that, as an omnipotent being, God can create ex nihilo, i.e., something completely new that is not already contained in any way in God. Still, we must ask: What exactly is that “something” that God could choose to create without it being already contained within Him, but is instead entirely new?
The third inquiry is: The kabbalists say that the soul of man is a part of God above, such that there is no distinction between God and the soul. God is the “whole” and the soul is “part.” This is comparable to a stone hewn from a mountain, in that the only difference between the stone and the mountain is that the stone is a “part” of the “whole” mountain. We imagine a stone quarried from a mountain by an axe built for that purpose, such that the “part” is separated from the “whole.” But how is that possible in the case of God? How can a “part” be separated from Him? How can we think of the soul only as a part of God’s essence?
The fourth inquiry is: The sitra aḥra [the “Other Side,” the forces of evil] and the kelipot [“husks,” a kabbalistic expression for negative aspects of reality] are unimaginably distant from God’s sanctity. How, then, could these emerge and come into being out of God’s sanctity?! Could it be that God’s sanctity actually exists within them?!
The fifth inquiry relates to the resurrection of the dead. The body is contemptible, and from the moment of birth it is already destined for death and burial. The Zohar even states (Teruma, 284, 457) that the soul cannot rise to its place in the Garden of Eden before the body has completely decomposed, leaving no trace. If so, what is the purpose of the [bodily] resurrection?
Could God not delight the soul without the body? There is a greater question. The Sages state that the dead will be resurrected with their bodily defects, so that no one will say that he is a different person. Afterward, God will heal those bodily defects (Zohar, Emor 51).
Why does God care that someone might say that the [resurrected] person is someone else?! Why does God need to recreate people’s defects and then heal them?
The sixth inquiry is: The Zohar (Tazria 40) states that man is the center of reality and that all of the upper worlds as well as all of this material world and all it contains were created for the sake of man. The Talmud states (Sanhedrin 37a) that a person must believe that the world was created for him. It seems difficult to understand that all of creation is for the sake of insignificant man, who is less than a hairsbreadth compared to the whole of existence. This becomes even more difficult to understand when man is compared to the infinite and lofty upper worlds. Why would God bother to create all of them for man?! And what does man need with all of this?!
Part 1: The Desire to Receive THE PURPOSE OF CREATION One strategy for answering these questions is to begin with the end – namely, the end [i.e., purpose] of creation. After all, one cannot understand anything from the middle, only from its end. Clearly, every action has a purpose, since only an insane person acts purposelessly.
I know that there are thinkers – those who reject the yoke of Torah and mitzvot – who say that the Creator created reality and then abandoned it due to the insignificance of creatures. It is inappropriate for the Creator to have providence over their insignificant and distasteful actions. This is foolish. This would be a reasonable conclusion if we [humans] had created ourselves along with all of the distasteful and defective aspects of our nature.
But we have concluded that God, the most perfect of beings, is the craftsman who created and designed our bodies – with all of their positive and defective traits. A distasteful and defective product will never emerge from a perfect builder. Every product attests to the nature of its maker. It is not the fault of a ratty item of clothing that it was prepared by an unqualified tailor.
The Talmud makes this point (Taanit 20a): An incident occurred in which Rabbi Elazar, son of Rabbi Shimon...happened upon an exceedingly ugly person, who said to him, “Greetings to you, my rabbi,” but Rabbi Elazar did not return his greeting. Instead, Rabbi Elazar said to him, “Worthless [reika] person, how ugly is that man. Are all the people of your city as ugly as you?” The man said to him, “I do not know, but you should go and say to the Craftsman Who made me: ‘How ugly is the vessel you made!’”
When Rabbi Elazar realized that he had sinned and insulted this man merely on account of his appearance, he descended from his donkey and prostrated himself before him, and he said to the man: “I have sinned against you; forgive me.”
These “thinkers” claim that it is inappropriate for God to have providence over us and that He has abandoned us due to our lowliness and nothingness. This indicates only their own lack of understanding. Imagine meeting a person who suggests creating beings who are destined to suffer and experience pain for all of their lives, much as we do. Moreover, that person plans to forsake them, with no intention of offering his providence over them or assisting them in any way. We would certainly condemn and scorn such a person. Can we imagine saying such a thing about the necessary, existent God?!
Therefore, a clear-thinking individual must realize that the truth is the opposite of what appears on the surface. He must conclude that we are good and that we are the loftiest of creatures. We are of infinite significance. We are worthy of the Craftsman who made us. Any flaws in our bodies – whatever explanations we might offer for them – ultimately stem from the Creator who created us with all of our human nature. After all, it is clear that “He made us, and we did not” (Ps. 100:3). He knows all of the consequences of our human nature and our bad tendencies, which He created within us.
Thus, what we stated before must be true: We must look at the purpose and end of creation in order to understand everything. As the saying goes: “Do not show anything to a fool while it is in the middle of being constructed.”
The Sages (see R. Ḥaim Vital’s Etz Ḥayyim, Shaar HaKellalim at the beginning of the first chapter) already explained that God created the world only in order to benefit His creatures. We must pay attention and focus on this, for it is the end and purpose of the creation of the world. [People] must understand that since the purpose of creation is to benefit creatures, it must be that [God] created in our souls a great desire to receive that which He intended to provide to them. After all, the greater the desire to receive a benefit, the greater the pleasure one derives from that benefit. One who has a greater desire to receive will have a proportionally greater pleasure from it, and one who has a lesser desire to receive will have a proportionally lesser pleasure from it. Hence, the intention behind creation requires creating souls with an enormous and exaggerated desire [for that pleasure], for that accords with the great pleasure with which the Almighty intended to pleasure the souls. Pleasure and the desire to receive are proportionate to one another.
RENEWED CREATION Given the above, we can answer the second inquiry properly and clearly. We wanted to identify the reality about which it can be said that it does not exist and is not contained in God’s essence, such that we can say that it was created “something from nothing,” ex nihilo.
Now that we know that the intention behind creation was to give pleasure to His creatures, He must have created a “desire to receive” from God all of the pleasure and good that He intended for them. This desire to receive could not have been contained in God’s essence prior to the creation of [human] souls, for from whom could He have received [given that there was nothing other than God]? He then created something new that had not been part of Him.
Given this, there was no need to create anything other than that desire to receive in order to achieve the goal of creation. This new creation [of a desire to receive] itself supplied to God all that was needed to fulfill the goal of creation, which He had planned in order to benefit us. All of the content of the plan of creation – that is, all of the good He intended for us – would flow directly from God’s essence, and He would not have to create them anew, since they would flow from pre-existing reality to the great desire to receive [that is already in] souls. It follows absolutely that all of material existence, from beginning to end, in this unique creation is [really] nothing other than “the desire to receive.”
THE SOULS – PART OF GOD ABOVE This explains the position of the kabbalists discussed in inquiry number three. We asked: How can we speak of the souls as part of God above? We compared this to a stone quarried from a mountain, regarding which there is no distinction between them. Instead, this [the stones] are “part” of that “whole” [the mountain]. We then asked: When the stone separates from the mountain, it is separated only due to acts that are designed to separate it. But we cannot say such a thing about God’s essence! How did the souls separate from the essence of God, becoming creatures distinct from the Creator?!
We can now understand this precisely. Just as an axe splits and divides a physical object into two parts, a change in form [essence] separates a spiritual thing into two. For example, when two people love one another, one can say that they are connected to each another as one body. When they hate each another, one can say that they are as distant from each other as west is from east.
This is not a description of their physical closeness or distance, but a similarity in their forms. Since the two of them are similar in form to one another – each loves what the other one loves and hates what the other one hates, etc. – they love one another and cleave to one another. If their form changes, such that one loves what the other hates or the like, they will become proportionally distant from one another, to the point of hatred.
If they are opposites in form – such that whatever one likes, the other hates, and vice versa – then they are extremely distant from one another, as far as east is from west.
Differences in form act spiritually much as the axe acts physically to separate things. The distance [between the two spiritual things] will be proportional to the difference in form. Understand, as discussed, that souls are imbued with a desire to receive pleasure, which, as we demonstrated, does not exist at all within the Creator. Heaven forfend! From whom could God receive?! This change in form that the souls acquire serves to separate them from God’s essence, much as the axe separates a stone from the mountain. This change in form detaches the souls from God, and they become creatures separate from Him. Still, anything that the souls acquire from God’s light flows from a pre-existing reality, from God’s essence.
If so, it follows that from the perspective of the divine light received by the vessel – which is the desire to receive – there is absolutely no difference between the soul and God’s essence, as it [the divine light] flows from the pre-existing reality of God’s essence directly to the souls. The entire difference between the soul and God’s essence is that the soul is only a part of God’s essence. The limited amount of divine light received by the vessel, the desire to receive, becomes a separate entity from the Divine due to this change of form.
Through it [this change in form], the light transformed from being in the category of “All” to being in the category of “part.” Thus, the only difference between them is that one is “all” and the other is “part,” like a stone that is quarried from the mountain. Study this carefully, since I cannot expound more about such lofty things.
THE REASON THE SYSTEM OF IMPURITY AND THE “HUSKS” COME INTO BEING We are now in a position to answer query four. How can the system [lit. chariot] of impurity and the husks emerge from the sanctity of God, since they are so radically distant from God’s sanctity? How can God maintain and nourish them?
We must first understand the true essence of impurity and husks. Know that the desire to receive – which, as we said, is the essence of the souls as they were created, since that enables them to receive all of the fullness planned for creation – does not remain as it was [originally] in the souls. Had it [the desire to receive] remained the same, they [the souls] would always remain separate from God, since their change in form separates them from God.
In order to repair the separation [from God] that is present in the vessel of the souls, God created all of the worlds and divided them into two systems, as the verse states: “God made both, one opposite the other” (Eccl. 7:14). These are the four holy worlds of ABYA (Atzilut [Emanation], Beria [Creation], Yetzira [Formation], and Asiya [Action](, as well as their counterparts – four impure ABYA worlds. God established a desire to give in the holy system of ABYA, and He removed from them a selfish desire to receive (as I will explain in chapters 14–19 below). He placed that [desire to receive] in the impure ABYA worlds, which separated them from God and from the worlds of sanctity.
This is why the husks are referred to as “dead,” as the verse describes: “sacrifices of the dead” (Ps. 106:28). Similarly, evildoers are attracted to them [the husks], as the Sages state: “The wicked, [even] during their lives, are called dead” (Berakhot 18b). This is because their inherent desire to receive, which is the opposite of the form that stems from God’s sanctity, separates them from the Life-Force of the Living; they exist at opposite poles from God.
For God has no desire to receive, but only to give to others. And the husks contain no element of giving, but only receiving for their own pleasure. These are extreme opposites. It is known that spiritual distance starts with a small difference in form and ends with a form that is radically opposite, at an extreme distance, on another level entirely.
The worlds developed [nishtalshelu] until this material world came into being, a place that contains both body and soul, and a time wherein both corruption and repair are possible. The body, which is the desire to receive, derived from its roots in God’s plan for creation, as discussed earlier. But it [the body] passed through the worlds of impurity, as Job states: “A wild ass gives birth to a human” (Job 11:12). [The words “wild ass” refer to the worlds of impurity.] It [the body] remains enslaved under that system until age thirteen. That is the period of corruption.
After age thirteen, a person’s performance of mitzvot – performed with the intention to give satisfaction to his Maker – begins purifying the selfish desire to receive that had been imprinted in him. [Performance of mitzvot] gradually turns [that selfish desire] into a desire to give. This gradually draws [mamshikh] the holy soul from its roots in the plan of creation. It [the holy soul] traverses the entire system of sanctified worlds and becomes enclothed in the body. That is the time of repair.
From then on, he continually acquires and reaches levels of sanctity that are part of the plan of creation and are present in the Ein Sof [the Infinite]. These [levels of sanctity] assist the person in transforming the selfish desire to receive that is embedded in him into a desire to give, to the point that he becomes one who receives only in order to give satisfaction to his Maker rather than to benefit himself.
In this way, a person equates his own form to [that of] his Maker. For receiving for the sake of giving to others is considered the purest form of giving. (This is related to what is stated in Kiddushin 7a: If a woman gives a gift to an important man, she receives benefit from the fact that he consents to accept a gift from her. That benefit is adequate to be considered the exchange that is legally required for them to be married.
The fact that he accepts the gift in order for her to benefit from the fact that she gave it to him is considered a complete gift to her.) The person then achieves a complete bond with God. For a spiritual bond is nothing other than an equating of form. To paraphrase a statement of the Sages: “How can one cleave to God?
Rather, cleave to His attributes” (based on Sota 14a). That is how a person can become worthy to receive all of the good, pleasantness, and softness that was in the plan of creation.
We now understand that the desire to receive, which is embedded in the soul due to the plan of creation, requires repair. For God has created the two systems [the system of purity and the system of impurity, the sitra aḥra], one opposite the other, through which the souls pass. Through them, they are separated into two aspects, the body and the soul, which become intertwined [mitlabshot, lit. enclothed in one another].
Through Torah and mitzvot, the desire to receive is eventually transformed into a desire to give. Then [after that transformation], the souls can receive all of the good that is in the plan of creation, and they also become worthy of a stronger bond with God, since the service of Torah and mitzvot transform the form [of the soul] into that of the Creator. This is the last stage of repair. Then there will be no need for the impure “Other Side,” which will be eliminated from the earth, and death shall be swallowed up forever.
All of the service of Torah and mitzvot – which was granted to the entire world during the six thousand years of the world’s existence, and to each individual for the seventy years of his life – is for the purpose of bringing about that final stage of repair, in which people’s forms become equated [with that of God], as discussed.
This also explains how the system of husks and impurity emanate from God’s sanctity. They are a necessary precursor to the creation of bodies, which can then be repaired (along with the desire to receive) through Torah and mitzvot. If bodies with a defective desire to receive had not emanated from the system of impurity, we would be unable to repair them, since a person cannot repair what he does not possess.
Part 2; The Repaired Desire to Receive We must still understand: If the selfish desire to receive is itself so negative and defective, how did the Ein Sof conceive of it in the plan of creation? The Ein Sof is absolutely unified, in ways that humans cannot describe!
The explanation is as follows: Prior to [God’s] thought to create the souls, His thought encompassed everything, for He needs no tools like we do. [As soon as He thought,] immediately, all of the souls emerged and came into being, as did all of the future worlds that would be created, filled with all of the good, pleasure, and tenderness that He had planned for them [the souls]. [These worlds would] contain the endpoint of the souls’ perfection, which the souls would receive at the end of the repair. [The end of the repair would occur] after the desire to receive would already be completely and perfectly repaired and transformed into a pure desire to give; [at that point,] the form [of the souls] would become identical to that of God, from which all emanates (Zohar, Mishpatim, 51; Zohar Ḥadash, Bereishit, 243).
This is because the divine eternality contains past, present, and future as one. The future is, for Him, like the present, and “time for things to develop” is inapplicable to God. For this reason, the defective desire to receive in its differentiated form [tzura d’peruda] was never present in the Ein Sof. On the contrary, the equation of the forms that will be revealed in the future, at the end of the repair, was immediately present in God’s eternality.
The Sages explained this esoteric idea in Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer 73. “Prior to creation, He was one and His name was one.” The differentiated form of the desire to receive was not revealed at all in the reality of the souls as they emerged from the plan of creation. Rather, they clung to God through the equation of forms, which is the secret of “He and His name are one.” See my Talmud Eser HaSefirot, Part 1.
THE THREE STATES OF THE SOULS It necessarily follows that souls can generally exist in three states: 1) Their existence within the Infinite as part of the plan of creation. They already have their future form, [the one that they will have] after the repair is complete.
2) Their existence during the six thousand years [of this world’s existence], in which they are separated into the two systems, yielding the body and the soul. In that state, they are given the service of Torah and mitzvot so that they can transform their [selfish] desire to receive into a[n altruistic] desire to give satisfaction to their Creator and not for themselves at all. During this time, their bodies will not be repaired at all; only the souls will.
That is to say, [the souls] must eliminate from themselves any element of selfish receiving, which is the aspect of the body, and remain with only an element of giving, which is the form of the souls’ desire. Even the souls of the righteous cannot enjoy the pleasures of Eden after death until their bodies have completely decomposed in the grave.
3) Complete repair of the souls following the resurrection of the dead. Then, even the bodies shall be repaired, and even the receiving itself, which is the form of the body, will be transformed such that a form of pure giving will rest upon it [the body]. The souls will then become worthy of receiving for themselves all of the good, pleasure, and pleasantness that is in the plan of creation, while still being worthy of this strong bond [with God], since they will be identical in form to their Creator. For they will not receive all this [pleasure that is in the plan of creation] out of their own desire to receive, but out of their desire to give pleasure to their Creator. After all, God has pleasure when others receive from Him.
To simplify the discussion, from now on, I will use the terms “first state,” “second state,” and “third state.” Later, recall how I have defined these terms here.
When one examines these three states, he will realize that they are dependent on one another. If one of them were absent, the others would of necessity also be absent. For example, without the third state, in which the form of receiving is transformed into the form of giving, the first state could never have emerged from the Ein Sof [Infinite]. All of the various perfections only emerged [from the Ein Sof] because they would eventually reach the third state. Within the eternality of God, the future [third state] was already there in the present. The perfection perceived in that [first] form was simply “copied” [haataka] from the future [third state] into the present that was there [in the first state]. If it were conceivable that the future would not happen, then there would be no existence [of the perfected souls] in the present [first state]. That is, the third state requires the reality of the first state. How much more so regarding the hypothetical elimination of something from the second state, which contains all of the service [of God] that is meant to lead to the third stage – the process of defects and gradual repair of the souls from level to level. [If the second state would not exist,] how could the third state occur? Hence, the second state requires the third to occur.
In addition, if the first state in the Ein Sof already contains all of the perfections of the third state, it follows that the second and third states must occur, with all of the perfections that are already present there [in the first stage]. That is to say, the first state itself requires that the two competing systems [of the body and soul] must separate in the second stage, so that the body – which exists as a defective desire to receive, damaged by the system of impurity – could then be repaired.
Were it not for the system of the worlds of impurity, we would never possess that desire to receive, and it would therefore be impossible to repair that desire and bring about the third stage, because a person cannot repair what he does not possess. Thus, do not ask how the system of impurity emerges out of the first stage, since the opposite is the case. The first stage requires the existence [of the system of impurity] in the second stage.
FREE WILL Do not ask the following question: According to this, do we not (God forbid) have free will, since we are completely destined to become perfect and enter the third state, since it [the perfection of the third stage] is already present in the first stage?
The explanation is as follows: God prepared two paths in the second stage to bring us to the third stage. The first is through fulfilling Torah and mitzvot, as explained above. The second is through suffering. The suffering itself purifies the body, and it forces us to eventually transform our desire to receive into the form of the desire to give, and therefore to bond with God.
This is related to what the Sages state (Sanhedrin 97b): “If the Jewish people repent, good [they will be redeemed]; if not, I will appoint a king over you like Haman [who will afflict you with harsh punishments] and force you to repent.” “In its time, I will hasten it” (Is. 60:22). The Sages explain (Sanhedrin 98a): “If they are worthy, I will hasten it [the redemption]; if they are not worthy, it will be at its time.”
This means that if we are worthy of using the first path, i.e., that of Torah and mitzvot, then we hasten our repair, and we will not require severe, bitter suffering over a long period of time to force us to return to the proper path. If not, however, [the repair] will occur at its time – that is, at the time that the suffering will bring about the repair, and the time of repair will arrive against our will. (That path of suffering includes the punishments of the souls in gehinnom.)
In either case, the repair will be completed in the third stage, which is inevitable given the first stage, and our free will determines whether [the third stage] arrives through suffering or through Torah and mitzvot.
We thus explained how the three stages of the souls are interconnected and even necessarily follow from one another.
THE TRUE BODY Given the above, we can now answer our third inquiry. We had asked: When we look at ourselves, we see ourselves as defective. There is little more despicable than we are. Yet, when we look at the Creator who created us, we expect ourselves [as His creatures] to be most lofty, worthy of the highest praise. After all, given our Creator, [we ought to be perfect,] since it is only natural for a perfect being to produce perfect products.
Based on the above, this is explained. Our body – with all of its contingencies and with the insignificant things it has acquired – is not our true body. Our true body – the eternal and wholly perfect one – is already present in the Ein Sof as part of the first stage. It receives its form there [in the Ein Sof], which is the form that it will take in the future in the third stage. [That form is] receiving in the form of giving [i.e., the good that one gains by giving to others], which is identical to the form of the Ein Sof.
True, our situation in the first stage requires that in the second stage, we will receive the husk [kelipa] of that perfect body, with its despicable and defective form – the selfish desire to receive. That [desire] is the force that separates [the soul] from the Ein Sof. That then leads to the repair of the body, which enables us to receive the eternal, completely actualized body in the third stage.
Therefore, we should not complain about this at all. For our service [of God] is unimaginable without this disposable and faulty body, since a person cannot repair what he does not contain. That is to say, even our body in the second stage is in fact perfect, as befitting the perfect Creator who made us. This [physical] body does not hurt us at all, since it will eventually die and be removed.
Our bodies are prepared for us only to the extent necessary for them to [eventually] be removed so that we can receive our eternal form.
ETERNAL CREATURES This also answers our fifth inquiry. We asked: How is it possible that from the Eternal will emerge transient creatures that come into being and cease to be? The answer to this question is now clear. For we emerged from before Him in a manner that is appropriate for His eternality; [we emerged] as eternal and entirely perfect creatures.
This eternality necessarily requires that the husk of the body, which was given to us only for service [of God], be temporary and cease to be. For had it [the body] remained in eternality, God forbid, then we would remain eternally separate from the Life-Force of the Living. We have already stated (see 13 above) that this form of our bodies, the selfish desire to receive, is not at all present in the eternal plan for creation.
There [in the eternal], we have the [perfected] forms of the third stage. Still, we must exist in the second form [for a time] in order to enable the repair, as discussed.
Do not ask at all about creatures in the world other than humans. For humans are the center of creation, as we will discuss later in chapter 39. The rest of the creatures are not at all valuable in themselves, except to the extent that they contribute to humanity by bringing [people] to perfection. Hence, they [other creatures] rise and fall with him [man], and they are insignificant in themselves.
SUFFERING The above also answers inquiry four. We had asked: It is the nature of the good to be benevolent. If so, why did God intentionally create creatures who would suffer throughout their lives? The answer is that all of the suffering is necessary due to the first stage. The perfect eternality there [in the first stage] depends on the future third stage. This forces one to walk either on the path of Torah or the path of suffering [in the second stage] in order to arrive and obtain his eternity in the third stage (see above, chapter 15). All of this suffering impacts only the husk of one’s [physical] body, which was created only to die and be buried. This teaches that the selfish desire to receive that is present [in the body] was only created to be erased and removed from the world. It is to be transformed into a desire to give. Our suffering only serves to reveal the insignificance and damage that are present in it [the body].
