The Soul Borrows Its Four Hungers From Four Places

Most people imagine a single thing called desire sitting inside them, pulling on every string at once. Baal HaSulam, writing his Preface to the Zohar in 1940s Jerusalem, said the inner life is not a single hunger. It is four, and each one is on loan from a different floor of the cosmos.

The first hunger comes from below

Rabbi Yehuda Leib HaLevi Ashlag, known as Baal HaSulam for his ladder-rung commentary on the Zohar, was trying to explain something the Zohar drops on the table without warning. The soul in the world of Beria (Creation) does not generate its own wants. It receives them, four distinct grades of them, from four distinct sources.

The first grade is the will to receive what a person needs to stay alive. Food. Shelter. The minimum that keeps the body upright. Ashlag teaches in paragraph 21 of the Preface that this hunger is supplied by the palaces and the clothing of the spiritual world, the lowest spiritual structures the soul stands above. The most basic appetite, the one we are most embarrassed by, comes from the lowest rung.

The second hunger comes from the angels

The second grade is what Ashlag calls the animal indulgences. Not survival. Growth. The pleasures that thicken a person, that make the body more than a minimum. He says the soul receives this from the angels of that world.

Read that again. The same angels you imagine standing in adoration before the Throne are also the conduit for the extra serving, the second glass of wine, the indulgence that goes past need. Ashlag is not scandalized by this. He cites Tikkunei Zohar to back the point. The angels carry spiritual illuminations that exceed what subsistence requires, and they pour the excess down to expand the vessels the soul wears.

The third hunger comes from your own kind

The third grade is human desire proper. The hunger for status, recognition, love, the wants that only make sense in the company of other people. Where does the soul collect that?

From the other souls. Ashlag is very clear. Just as a person picks up these appetites from the people around him in this world, the soul in Beria gathers them from the other souls inhabiting that world. The Kabbalist is sketching a society in the upper world, souls feeding souls the way teenagers feed each other ambition in a high school cafeteria. The mechanism is the same. Only the substance has changed.

The fourth hunger comes from the sefirot themselves

The fourth grade is the hunger for knowledge. Not information. The deep wanting that pulls a mind toward Chokhmah (Wisdom), Bina (Understanding), and Da'at (Knowledge), the three highest faculties Kabbalah lets a person develop.

This one, Ashlag says, the soul does not receive from anything below itself. It receives directly from the sefirot of that world. The desire to know God is on loan from God's own attributes. The wanting is a signal sent down from the thing being wanted.

A supernal man built from 613 pieces

Ashlag does not stop there. If the soul has four kinds of hunger, what is the soul itself made of? Where does its shape come from? In paragraph 38 of the Preface, he gives the answer that locks the system together. From Beria downward, meaning from the moment Bina combines with Malkhut, the attribute of judgment, the images and the forms of all beings start to flow. Not in Bina's own place. The shapes never leave Bina. They appear, instead, in the place of the recipients. In the souls themselves. The colors are real, but they are real from our side. From above, there is only the unbroken white of the source.

Then Ashlag pulls out the Zohar's most startling claim. God made the form of the chariot of the supernal man, descended into it, and enclothed Himself in the shape of a human being. The 613 vessels of that supernal body, Ashlag says, are drawn straight from the vessels of the soul. 248 limbs, the same number as the positive commandments. 365 spiritual sinews, the same number as the prohibitions. The whole body of God in Kabbalistic vision is mapped to the same skeleton your soul wears.

He breaks the figure into five parts, one for each letter of the divine Name. The head is Keter (Crown). From the mouth to the chest is Chokhmah. From the chest to the navel is Bina. From the navel to the legs are Tiferet and Malkhut bound together.

What this changes about your hungers

Ashlag wrote this in a decade when Europe was destroying Jewish bodies as fast as it could find them. He kept teaching that the body and the soul are the same shape, and that every hunger you carry is connected to a specific door in heaven. The crust of bread you need for survival, the second helping you crave, the praise you want from your neighbor, the knowledge of God you ache for at night, each one is a different rope dropped down from a different floor.

You are not chaos with skin around it. You are a stack of four open hands, each one held under a different stream.