Lofty Esoteric Luranic Knowledge

This section of the page will constantly be updated with more Torah-related information, for your learning:


This section of the page will constantly be updated with more Torah-related information, for your learning:

In Lurianic Kabbalah, the 10 sefirot are divided and categorized into 5 partzufim (faces):
Arikh anpin - Keter
Abba - hokhmah
Imma - binah
Zeir anpin - Chesed to Yesod
Nukva - Malkhuth

Then there's also another division to some of these faces:
Lower Abba is called Israel Saba
Lower Imma is called Tevunah
Between Zeir Anpin and Imma is Leah
Zeir Anpin consists of Israel and Yaakov

And so on.


In the Zohar, Egypt represents the demonic. The descent to Egypt is the encountering with the demonic, the struggle with psychic death and with spiritual recession. God made you suffer so that He will redeem you.

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The Messiah is always a personal Messiah before a Universal Messiah. The Cosmic is an allegory to the psychic. Our struggle against exile is our struggle against our distance from ourselves. A struggle against the incessant homesickness built into our soul.

The Torah is, in some ways, practical mysticism. Doing mitzvot has theurgical significance in amending the higher worlds.

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“There are two forces […] the substance of life is the lightened face. The substance of death is the darkened face; as is written: ‘In darkness he made me dwell like the dead for eternity’.

The stars draw the darkness into them. […] Each and every man has the aspect of lightened face […] and the grip of the seven stars, who are the faces of gloom.”

~Rebbe Nachman, Likutey Moharan
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“The Malchut of Dawwid is referred as the moon, for it renews itself every month, as one needs to renew oneself […] For this is the essence of living: renewing oneself in each moment […] For we never, G-d forbid, get old.”

~Reb Noson
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Rav Avraham Mordechai Gottlieb provides us with his own summation of the principles of Ashlag’s system. There, Rav Gottlieb writes:

The essence of good in the world (that is, the Good Inclination and the concepts of purity, holiness, love of others, and all other good attributes) is the will-to-give. The essence of all evil in the world (that is, the Evil Inclination, the husks, the Other Side, Egoism, self-love, and all the disgusting attributes like lust, pride, sloth, etc.) is the will-to-take pleasure and happiness for one’s self interest.

Therefore, in some way, Rav Ashlag’s binary of ratson lekabbel and ratson lehashpi'a is simply another framing of the classic good-evil duality. However, it goes beyond that to a rather specific ideation of what characterizes ‘good’ and ‘evil.’ Namely, the good is everything altruistic and the evil is everything egoistic. This is based on the assumption that God is entirely good , and since we know that God can only give (for from whom would God take?) then we know that giving is good and Godly and taking is bad and un-Godly. Gottlieb says as much as well:

Therefore, the basics of serving God are not so complicated, as many in the world argue.
Rather there are only two:

1) Suppression of the will-to-take

2) Acquisition of the will-to-give.

All the other concepts and attributes and natural states, they are all branches (symptoms) connected to and emerging from one of these two: the will-to-take and the will-to-give.

This two-part task bears within it another concept, which we will look at shortly, in which weassume that imitation of God (who only gives) is the goal of the spiritual life. To do so we must disengage from the egoistic will-to-take and instead transform ourselves into entirely giving beings. How is that accomplished? Gottlieb explains it thus: The work of giving is divided into two:

1) A person needs to perform ‘giving actions’ between themselves and others and between themselves and God, not drawn from the desire to receive a reward, but only out of love of others. After a person has perfected this work completely, in which they annihilate their ‘self,’32 which is the will-to-take, and all of their actions in life are only in giving to others, then they reach stage

2) In which a person is able to receive pleasure and happiness, though not from the will-to-take, but only because they want to give pleasure to God or to others.