The book of time

Kabbalah Korner by  Rabbi Eliyahu Yaakov

 
You often hear people claiming that there's no such thing as Free Will. They maintain that all is determined by genetics, conditioning, or chemicals in your brain.
However, imagine a professor who preaches this theory of human conditioning. For a full semester, he explains to an eager group of students yearning to shirk any sense of moral responsibility how man is simply the result of the sum total of his DNA and his experiences; how, although society must protect itself, an individual cannot be blamed for his actions or their consequences.
Now, suppose the professor comes home early one day and finds his wife in bed with his best friend.
Consider this professor's reaction.
Is it passive acceptance and tolerance, or does he react as most do—with shock, anger, and the desire to seek revenge?
According to the professor's own theory, both his wife and his friend were simply responding to stimuli.
If the professor were to truly believe that man has no control over his responses, he would never react to betrayal with hate.
A person only reacts in this manner when the one who hurt him acted with intent, by choice, or with negligence. Only when, in your opinion, a person should have or could have acted differently, are you upset with him. Disappointment and anger directed at another are clear and outright testimonies to one's conscious or subconscious acknowledgement that the other makes decisions.
To further this point, suppose this whole episode with the professor's wife never took place, and, in fact, the professor and his wife have a blissful, loving relationship. One day, this professor and his wife are enjoying a beautiful stroll on a crisp spring morning when a bird flying overhead suddenly has a heart attack and falls out of the sky straight onto the professor's wife, killing her on the spot.

Free will: humans, animals and angels

photo by Murray Mitchell

Kabbalah Korner By Rabbi Eliyahu Yaakov

There is the Childish definition and there is the Adultish definition. The Childish Definition states that pleasure is what it feels like when I do it. Whereas the Adultish Definition states that pleasure is the totality of how it is going to affect me.

We also outlined the manner in which a society of adults that make their choices about pleasure based on the Childish definition is going to wind up with a disastrous situation on its hands.

The truth is that making a choice to overcome the Childish side of oneself in favor of making an Adultish decision is synonymous with the difference between Animal-like behavior and Human-like behavior.

Animal-like behavior is instinctual and reactive, whereas Human-like behavior is conscious and proactive.

The higher choice to act in a Human-like manner is, in a certain sense, miraculous. That is, the classic portrayal of a miracle is God doing something that overrides nature, transcending the way the world usually operates. Thus, when a person overrides his or her own nature, they too, in a sense, achieve a personal miracle. Every time a person feels like lying down on the couch to do nothing, but instead gets up and does something positive, he is overriding his personal nature.

This is the beginning of what it means to be spiritual.

Remember to dream

Kabbalah Korner by Rabbi Eliyahu Yaakov.

 

In sports, it is common for coaches to tell their athletes to dream of their sport day and night. Indeed, there is a Jewish idea that relates to making use of the mind in order to breed a desired result, only with something a little more meaningful than basketball.
Toward the end of Abraham's life, the Bible tells us, "Abraham was old, and he came with days." At first glance, this seems repetitive: If he was old then obviously he had days, and if he had days, is it not clear that he was old?
Bursting Inspiration
You may have noticed that the nature of human beings when they experience something new and inspirational is to jump into action. They were moved and now they get moving. They start making phone calls, assembling their "troops," and strategizing. They are ready to make a difference! They are ready to make a change!
However, it's not long before they hit a block, and things start to slow down. Then another dead-end causes things to move slower. Thoughts of the inspirational blast-off experience just don't seem to arouse those same passionate feelings as they once did. Eventually, they run out of gas. The burst of energy was great, but now that's something of the past. The inspiration has become stale, causing the motivation to dry up. Those ideas, once full of life and zeal, have turned old and rusty.

Kabbalah korner: a parallel universe

To begin to grasp life and the world in its true light, one needs to have a clear understanding of what is primary and what is extraneous.

By Rabbi Eliyahu Yaakov. 
Many are familiar with the fact that the word ;Kabbalah' means receiving—we are receiving the deepest teachings that have been passed down through the generations from teacher to student. In order to truly grasp these teachings, we cannot simply go out and learn them. Rather, we must open up a place inside ourselves where they can be received and become a part of our very being.
However, the word ;Kabbalah' also comes from the Hebrew word makbeel, meaning parallel. One of the most fundamental teachings of Kabbalah is that G-d looked into the Torah and created the world; that is to say, the Torah is the blueprint of the world. Just as a builder looks at a blueprint and then builds a building parallel to that which is in the blueprint, so did G-d look at the Torah before creating our world to match it.
The implications of this are astounding. For example, it is well-known that, according to Judaism, we should bless G-d when partaking of His world. If we have a snack, wear new clothes, or even see a beautiful person, there is a blessing for it. We all think that the way this worked was that originally there was a fruit and so G-d said that we ought to make a blessing on it. However, when we understand that our physical world has its root in the spiritual, we see that really G-d first looked into the Torah and saw that there is a spiritual concept of making a blessing, and therefore G-d created the fruit. In a similar vein, we think that our eyes permit us to see, whereas Kabbalah teaches that our eyes are actually what stop us from seeing: When we were purely spiritual—before we were in our bodies—we could see from one end of the world to the other. Now we are limited to seeing as far as the eye can see.