A Kabbalistic Journey Through Time #2 - Collected Talks of David Solomon #103

[Music] last week i spoke about primary texts of kabbalistic literature that are the vehicle for the revelation of the divine in the world through the medium of jewish mystical thinking and we looked at sephietsira and the summary there was basically that that's talking about this thing called the ten sphere of but we don't know what they are then along comes the bahir and the baharis starts saying well we can understand that the divine has attributes we could even give them a number that the 10th spherot that the sephietsir is talking about are 10 divine attributes you know kindness wisdom judgment and we're not even sure what their order is and the third book we looked at which comes a century even after that at least a century after that is saying g catilla who is saying basically i'm here to tell you uh what those spherot are and they are in fact concentrated symbolic manifestations of the various names of god because the names of god is really all that's going on and at least at least two people from this from last week's session have told me independently that i have located the so and that they have plunged in and have been to put him mildly impressed jicatillo is amazing and he's basically got it he's the trigger for the whole launch pad that is about to happen not the trick of the launchpad the trigger for the launch i'm not doing this for dramatic effect i actually was enjoying this tea and it's now on the other side of the par god and i'm also stalling because i need to tell you uh what i'm going to look at tonight because this is the point of which we are ready to launch into we've only got a four-part course so i have to choose the nexus points very carefully and we're going to move probably a lot faster at some points in the development of thought and how kabula becomes revealed than we did in the last session where we had a bit of time even though we ran out of time to look at a couple of centuries that launch is about to reveal that wave of revelation that is about to happen at the end of the 13th century in spain is going to change the entirety of jewish life and thought and culture and indeed fundamentally the perception of our the nature of our relationship with the divine as a continuum in history and as a people it changes everything and we have already started to see the strands remember what i said at the beginning of last week that these revelations come effectively as waves of synthesis of taking disparate strands of jewish mystical thought and ideas and perceptions and welding them together to become the vessel for a new level of revelation that that is the whole point at the end of the day of torah torah for those of you who have studied a little bit of kabbalistic literature would know that torah and of course because those of you who've run out and bought your copy of would know that ji catilla has told you that torah is tifaret it's on the central pillar of the sphirat in the structural pattern that he gives you of the sriracha that i did on the board last week we'll no doubt have to do it again and that has a direct connection obviously to dart and dart is the divine consciousness coming into the world and dart comes into the world because it synthesizes the left and right polarities of divine creation divine creativity our creativity if we channel it that's g tiller in a nutshell but the shift that happens just around and after the time of is enormous and i'm going to be spending the bulk of what i'm going to talk about tonight of course on the zohar no i really am i may not do a good job but i really am you only have to spend five minutes inside any journey into kabbalah and you will come across the existence of a thing called the zohar the first thing you should realize is that contemporary scholarship believes not entirely but the sharper points within it have come to the realization that the zohar is not a book it's been a book for around about the last 4 500 years there is a book called the book of the zohar ever since the first edition of it was printed in mantua in 1558 but the tsar is not so much a book as a phenomenon now i'm not going to go because of the nature of what we're talking about here i'm not going to go so much into many of the features of the zohar such as the fact that it is it's you know and i'm thinking two particular aspects of any discussion of the zohar both of which are fascinating but i'm not going into them right now one of which of course is the attributional um debate about the zohar exactly who wrote it where did it come from and the other aspect of the zohar of course being the fact that it is written in zoharic aramaic which is a unique language it is a form or maybe a literary dialect of aramaic but there's a whole discussion to be had as to why that is we can go into it if people really need to but i'm not what i'm focusing on here what i'm focusing on here is the way that the zohar unfolds shifts in the revelation of divine ideas within the jewish people now one of the things i didn't talk about last night not last night last week when i looked at my notes i realized that there was a fundamental point that i had not discussed that is that one of the things that the bahir did when i talked about the bahir is such a unique turning point one of the things that the bahir did was that it mapped what it considered to be the divine attributes into the patriarchs of in other words the avat abraham isaac jacob avraham and of course sarah rivka rachel of the book of bereshit as signifiers of these divine attributes that with quite a development by the time you get to shaare or baji catilla so that is already that idea is already developed further in the sense that for example tiferet is a representation he's represented by jacob and they are both representational of at essentially for for of josef g it's about the name of god and therefore the four-letter tetragrammaton which is signified by all of these parallel symbols that he's going to give you but the tsar and of course he has the structure of the spheroid as we now understand it and if you recall he's going from malhot all the way up to quetta but the zohar constructs what is effectively a midrashic exegesis that maps the entire torah onto the sphirat dynamically and that shows a kind of a shift that's already happening from the personal focus of jicatilla of abu lafaye to a more cosmic focus and that's why the tsar at many levels is really a poem thousands of pages long an ecstatic poem about the relationship between god and the world god and the people of israel it's cosmic in nature and it is seeing the divine as invested in history not just in a figurative mythic way which it also does but in actuality every single figure in the torah represents something in the world of the sfirat every single verse of the torah is kabbalistically interpretable avraham is not a representation or a symbol of he said avraham is what avraham does and the verses that are used about avraham and where he goes and what he does and all the aspects to do with the story of avraham that gives us deeper and deeper insight into the nature of hessed the attribute the sphere of which is the sphere of expansion and of course of kindness of goodness of benevolence the torah for the tsar is the cosmic blueprint god looked in the torah and created the world out of the torah every single word every single verse every single word every single letter every single dot has cosmic importance and it is all interpretable but desire is doing much more than just that but that's something we need to understand obviously this great cosmic battle that's happening in the zohar is also of course very reflective of what's going on in the world at the time and once again we're not going there although one should not ignore those factors the great struggle between islam and christianity happening in spain and in the middle east the end of the crusades the defeat of the moors the christianization the reconquesta basically of spain all of this is in the background there are also some other very very strong strands of thought of mystical spiritual thought in the background that i'll touch upon in a moment as well but desire is doing more which the zohar synthesizes but desire is doing more in its unique contribution to the it's it's it's a it's a comp it's like the damn bursts are broken now with desire you've all seen the zohar yeah you know how big it is you've seen it put your hand up if you've ever seen the czar put your hand up if you've never seen a copy of the tsar yeah you you remember um anyone here ever know the late rabbi groener yeah yeah sarah barney used to have a saying he says i'm not going to imitate her if i grow up but he used to have a saying that um you should never sleep in the house where there isn't a copy of the tsar no i don't mean to spook anybody but i'm just putting it up and i'm just saying you know it's i'm an extremely cheeky person he was a great man but when he passed away um no sorry not when he passed away when his late robertson passed away another great human being uh and the children were sitting shiver and i ran in the house i i went out in running the house i went to say you know to be menachem but as soon as i'd done that i started rummaging through the bookcases looking for his copy of the zora i and i found one and i found one just two this is the zohar yeah so you're going to be saying ah this is the mongolia tradition you're going to be going oh okay three volumes not so bad not even as big as harry potter all right however it's when you open it that you realize that when you read when you're looking at the tsar what you're actually looking at is text like that completely block tiny text for a lot of pages if you want you can read the tsar in english and the best translation is at the moment is the pritzker it looks like this some of you would be familiar with the yellow volumes yep put your hand if you've ever seen this before put your hand up if you've never seen this before okay cool there's a reason for standing here yep it's this times 12. all right it's not an easy thing to acquire you'd need to do it probably over time but it is if you if you want to understand if you want to read desire you're either going to do it in aramaic or you're going to do it with danny matt yep who wrote that translation or you can do it in hebrew there are a number of hebrew translations but mats comes with a lot of notes it's very useful desire does more desire is also interested to describe the process about how the cosmos came into being the process of creation and how that happens and how creation is emanated from the infinite and how that process of creation is intimately bound up with this very very special relationship that the divine has with the jewish people and the two great the two twin in a sense archetypical figures of the zohar are could god in the form known as the holy one blessed be he but that's in aramaic kuch abriho and shakhita and shakhinta is obviously aramaic for the shechina is the divine presence which is represented in terms of the feminine the shrinter the is the tenth sphere of divine investment in creation and she seeks constantly throughout to reunite malhot seeks to reunite with tiferet in a vertical alignment to become one with tiferet and shrinta has two kind of levels one is the purely transcendent spiritual cosmic level that is present in the world the divine presence that is sometimes revealed to us and then a very tangible spiritual entity in the world called knesset israel who are the spiritual dimension of us the physical we are the jewish people physical in the world are the nukva or the feminine of the masculine aspect in relation to us the whole world is worked out according to unions whether horizontal or vertical the primary binary in humanity is that of the male and the female the perfection of that binary is union and if union between man and woman on every level but particularly the intimate level is the highest possible unity attainable within human experience then it is the ideal allegorical metaphorical symbolic vehicle for expressing the unity of god in the world our minds are not even capable of understanding the concept of one in relation to god and you will start to realize that when you start to realize that how can god be one infinite and nothing way beyond number way beyond the ability so the the highest possible way in which we can do but not only intellectually it's the highest possible way because we are able to draw down that level of unity into our own life because the mitzvot of the torah take on cosmic importance now and the zohar is also going to talk to you about a number of other things i won't go into right now i might come back if we have some time the czar is going to go into talking about this concept called the other side the sitra which is a parallel structure of the demonic it starts to understand evil of course as an agency of god the tsar is also going to tell you about the soul and the tsar is going to introduce this idea not introduced but it's bringing together all of these strands the tsar is the text that's going to tell us that there are basically three levels to the soul there's nephesh which is your animus that's the soul that walks around carlisle street goes into glicks on a friday morning and abuses people that's your nephesh then you've got rua which is a higher level of soul which is everybody goes ah i went to their i went to the wedding was there arua yes it was lovely that's a very base level of the concept of ruach but ruach is a completely inspired divine connection the level of rua is revealed at those moments otherwise you're walking around with your nephesh the level of ruach is revealed at those sorts of moments maybe also when learning torah and the level of nishama that's only revealed in the world on very special occasions or for very special people however the zohar is also giving us a picture in relation to the soul which is making pretty much the definitive call in a discussion that's been had already for quite some time in jewish thought even to the point of the tsar and it comes out fully behind the idea of reincarnation souls go through history and basically desire is saying you're going to be reincarnated three times wants to fix your nephesh wants to figure wants to fix your neshama and then you're out of here there are many many different permutations of that picture the tsar has a tripod system of the soul now people are going to go oh well well they're nice ideas and um i guess if that's what desire says then that's what desire says and all right fine [Music] not even scratching the surface here first of all you realize that the tsar is just to read it is sublime if you know any hebrew you can pick up the resonances of the aramaic and it will explode your brain if you don't know any hebrew that's also fine just read the aramaic but once you start to read the emery comes it's so sublime it's so poetic not just its language but its contents and the way the ideas are delivered that's all there's a literary quality to desire that i'm not giving over when i talk about its ideas but i want you to be aware of it the tsar became the foundational text or the writings of the tsar became the foundational text of jewish mysticism and when i say the r and its language in its terms and its concept and when i say the writings it's because there's no single text called the zohar really it's a collection of all sorts of textual units emerging from the same amelia whether that milieu was second century palestine or whether that milieu was 13th century castile there is a milieu of either one hardly likely just one person but i anyway on a number of anywhere from one up to several in a some sort of khabura a collective that study collective that we're producing these texts and there are discrete units of the zohar there are some very famous parts and i'll come on to that in a second because it's suddenly realized of course it's relevant to tomorrow night no tomorrow night there are a couple of intellectual currents going on in the world i'll clarify everything there are a couple of intellectual currents going on in the world at this time and without going into depth because we're not here to reveal the ideas of the gentiles but because they get revealed anyway in kabbalah but neoplatonism has been infiltrating western and even eastern thought for a long time neoplatonism is basically the idea that the divine and the corrupt world pluralistic world that we live in are bridged by a series of emanations and with each emanation the divine light becomes coarser and coarser until here in this world it's so thick that the divine is actually invisible that's the classic neoplatonic picture and neoplaton is platonism doesn't just invade philosophy it also invades christianity and it invades islam and of course it invade it invades it's we open the door and welcome it in and sit it down and give it a piece of not gefilte fish not in spain but it comes right into judaism when we're very happy with neoplatonism nothing in neuroplatinism that we can't handle but the tsar takes neuroplatinous ideas about emanation and it welds them with another thought stream that has been around in world culture for the last by the time of the tsar for at least the last thousand years and that of course is gnosticism which is the belief really at the end of the day gnosticism has many aspects but at the end of the day it constructs a duality basically and the human is at the center of a struggle between good and evil the ba here which we looked at last week is identified repeatedly as a gnostic text although it sublimates it under nominal rabbinic monotheism the zohar does exactly that it takes neo-platonism gnosticism and rabbinic monotheism and welds them together into a midrash about the relationship between god and the jewish people based on an understanding of the sphero that can be mystically contemplated and the things that philosophy is worried about is worried about for jewish philosophy which has been worried islamic philosophy and even christian philosophy have completely shrunk into their own sphincters over the whole issue of anthropomorphism and so philosophers are trying their best to show that the torah is not anthropomorphic and the cabalists wealth you know we're trying very hard to make sure they don't stay anthropomorphic and the tsar goes in completely the opposite direction the texts the two or three texts that i'm just going to talk about for the next minute in relation to the tsar are subtexts of the tsar one set of texts are called the idras and there's the idra rubber and the idrazoota just to give you an idea about how beautiful aramaic is right large is rubber little it's just such an amazing language the idr rubber you'll find in parashat nassau because the tsar is divided up into the parachute by editors for hundreds of years now and you'll find the idrazoota in parashat it is in the idrazoota that rubbish the main head and revealer of the entire circle of the tsar is about to depart this world in ecstatic unity with the divine he's going to give a discourse in which it's going to be such a level of revelation that his soul is going to leave his body and not just him he's taking some of the students with him and he wants them if you sit here for the teaching i'm about to give i'm going at the end of this and you're coming with me and they go okay cool that is in the idrizuta and the idrizuta and particularly even more than the resulta is a full-on mystical symbolic revelation about the divide about god using the human form as the vehicle for that it talks about the divine structure in great detail showing how divine energy comes into the world and it is of course in the setting of the drazota the rubbish iman istalip is gone and we understand that day to have been lag baomer which is tomorrow night the whole concept of the fires and the rush be in the miran that's all described in the idris utter but don't read the resulta unless you're ready to go into the id resulta if you don't know what you're doing inside the idr inside it will it will fry you so if you read it read it as read it as poetry but it's uh it's pretty full-on and the other text that we need to be aware of and i can see the time and i i i will i'm going to conclude this out because there's two other things i want to talk about two other texts but we need just to talk for example a text that exemplifies everything i've been talking about is the very famous sephirah ditsunota by the way the texts that i'm talking about using remember i spoke last week i'm going to use texts and books as the anchor for the revelation of ideas so every book i'm talking about is not just another book yeah these are the books without which really and any awareness of what's going on with these books contextually really yeah i will write them really is not on a path of of uh constructive kabbalistic knowledge we looked at the tsar i wrote the i talked about the idra rubber and the idrizulta i mean the indra rubber itself read the hidrappa i mean it's you know rubbish native became how long are we going to sit around in the maintenance of one pillar in other words it's a it's it's it's it's a turning point within kabbalistic thought about the nature of the spherot but the result is what we say uh well is what is is the setting of tomorrow and it's it's it's even more anthropomorphic but the one i'm going to talk about for a minute is called siphra these are all subtexts of the zohar okay the sephirah dits niyuta and you'll find that in parashat rumah and it's five short paragraphs it's like six pages long and it is the absolute essence of everything one of the most famous famous famous kabbalistic texts later translated into latin around the time of the enlightenment was read by light and leibniz by newton the suffragettes was regarded as the ultimate zoharic text to uncode it's a very difficult text to understand obviously the greatest cabalists that we've had have written on it the re and so on but it's very difficult it's a complete condensement of kabbalistic knowledge in five short chapters but it's basic idea is that the it's called a book of balance that everything is about balance that the cosmos is the result of a process of creation destruction and renewal the suffragets uttara talks very mystically about some primordial kings that died there's a reason i'm telling you all this um the primordial kings died and their weapons were not found now people reading that for hundreds of years going well that sounds very interesting i have no idea what he's talking about and i'll read it this obviously we're well on the other side of the ex explosion in kabulistic revelation that happened in the 16th century we're still back in the 13th century so for us this is extremely mystical but if we are gaining anything from an understanding of suffrage its niuta we can understand this process of creation destruction and renewal we can understand that renewal or repair happens when balance is restored the sephiroth neutral gives us an understanding that there is vert there is needs a need for balance between the higher on the vertical axis between the higher and the lower adamic forms obviously what there's nothing called and obviously there's a spiritualized atomic form of the spherot the representation of the essence of divine energy and governance coming into the world but the severed institute is revealing an even higher level of atomic form above that that everything is starting to align with and of course on the vertical on a horizon it's on a vertical but on a horizontal level unity is affected of course by male and female the primary binary of humanity so and of course the sephiroth is going to go and tell you the way that divine energy flows through the beard of the primordial man and so on and he gets heavily anthropomorphic these are important texts and these are starting to inform and develop the revelation of the divine through kabbalistic literature and then and then where's the squishy i'll use the tissue you can see how difficult it is for me to bring the zohar down in terms of the revelation of its ideas but it is an absolute quantum leap from what was going on before and of course the tsar is set in this idyllic environment with these rabbis are wandering around the land of israel in the second century these tanayim these famous sages meeting each other discussing secrets giving each other mysteries desire is an unbeatable literary experience if you want to get into it but it is not one you ever complete you're in it for a long time and then there's another text i want to talk about and i'm looking at the clock so i'm aware there's another text i want to talk about which is really difficult to explain unless we have already got some context on the zohar because this is going to be it is not it's going to it is an extremely significant link in the chain of revelation where we arrive at kabbalistic concepts as we understand them today and that is that there is a part of the zoharic literature which is called now the word tikkunim is virtually impossible to translate so oh i know oh i know some of you are sitting there going on that's not true david i know what tikkun means but i'm here to tell you that the word tikkun is impossible to translate in that context i know i've tried maybe maybe maybe the closest word in english that i have found to the word tikkunim is constructs danny matt chief editor and translator of the entire pritzker translates tikunim every differently every time he sees it and once sent me an email containing approximately 50 different possible english equivalents for the word it's very difficult to translate so i call it the tikkunim of the zohar and what the tikkunim of the tsar are they are discussions that rabbi shimon baruch is having anyone anyone read james joyce yeah put your hand up if you read joyce oh for real yeah so well this will be lost on you but if the zohar is ulysses then ticones are is finnegan's wake it's like it's like it's it's like someone read the tsar and then took ten tabs of acid and just started talking the it emerges we're not entirely sure that the conversations that yokai is having are actually before or after he was istalik from the world we're not sure and it's visited by all sorts of holy souls elijah the prophet and others come in and out and make astonishing revelations astonishing revelations that move it to become the bridge that it's going to become between the zohar and what's going to follow the tikkunim is also the author of the tuklim seems to be very very close in alignment if it's not identical identically the same person or it's someone very close to the world view of the sections of the zohar that you would have heard of called the raya mahemna who's heard of the rayamahamna so the raya mahemna the faithful shepherd texts which are actually inserted inside the tsar itself unlike tikkun naozar which is its own volume so it's not as big as the tsar but it's still this block text here but it's only about 150 folios and it's probably the same it's similar to the author of the ray mohemner and in fact it was printed just before the tsar so it's at it's it's it's as foundational to what's going forward as the czar and i'm going to talk about it for two minutes because the tikunim is the book that really introduces this idea it's not just the biblical figures that can represent aspects of the divine when it comes to the shrina when it comes to the divine presence when it comes to the sphera of malhot the feminine embedded and exiled in the world everything in the world is a representation of the divine everything everything you look at everything you encounter is a representation of the shrina the tikkun is teaching you to take the methodology of desire and apply it to your actual reality the tikkunesa also reveals this idea [Music] that there are in fact four dimensions to reality four broad domains four worlds this one which it calls the world of asia which is the world of doing of action of faction if you like it's a nice translation of it but the world of asia the world of making vibrating here but above us at a spiritual level is the world of formation the world of yitzila it's an angelic realm above that is the world of creation the world of course it is yes no it is it is it is okay i know i know where you did that i know why you did that okay the ticonderous zoro doesn't actually call them worlds it calls them domains domain of creation is the is is is the domain of the holy throne the merkabah the chariot the throne that the vision of ezekiel he's looking at the world the the realm of the hayat and above that is the realm of the realm of emanation and emanation and the divine or already incomplete the world of emanation is part of the of the of the essential divine each of these domains all worlds has their own paradigm of spherot and each is governed by an adamic form [Music] there is an adam of asiya there is an adam of itself and there is nadam of the idea of the full world really takes its rise from the tikkunim but if the new mist seems to be saying and once again and i'm i'm i'm i don't wanna i'm i'm gonna make sure i don't run out of time i i wanted to talk about this because the tikkunim has been uh coming further and further into consciousness in the last few years i know at least three people who've written phds on the tick on him just in the last few years and everybody seems to have a theory even going back over the last 20 or 30 years of scholarship on the tick on him people seem to be expressing different theories about what it's about what it's really trying to say but to me it seemed and i've spent a bit of time with the tickle him to me it seems to be pretty much about one thing and that is the theme of exile the shechina is in exile meaning the concept of god is in exile meaning exile is a state of consciousness and began says the tikkuni in exile everyone is stupid no one can see the divine reality right in front of them of course the shechina is in exile with us the jewish people are the ultimate living testamental symbol cosmic symbol of the state of the shechina that is what we are we are the in a sense wandering around looking for a home and the tikkunim brings us also a very startling idea about the messiah and about redemption everything in the tikkonim is this full-on relentless ecstatic mode of revelation you have to realize that uh oh and those of you who want to read it in english translation there isn't an english translation of the tikkuni but there will be there will be next year it will be it will be published and online and so on so i'm going to talk about this later in the year because um in my silliness i told kaufil shul that i would give a four part series on the messianic idea in jewish history and obviously there is a shift happening in the tikunim while everybody else is running around talking about how the messiah is really a manifestation of an ethnic kind of cosmic projection manifestation of which biblical figure david the tikkunim is telling you that in fact insignificant is not even telling you anything about that it doesn't really discuss david at all in its messianic ecstasy this has a big effect on various strands in later jewish mysticism is that the mashiach for the tikkunim is moshe because moses moshe is the level of dart here's the level that brings consciousness it is the one who gives the new torah each of the domains by the way of uh is the torah that we have but there is a whole new level at which it can be revealed the tikkunim is completely obsessed with the rise of the feminine like the bahir it is a very in a way non-linear text structured loosely around 70 discourses all about the first words of the torah in fact the first word parish it seventy mystical discourses each of which takes the word bereshit and then goes off in an incredible direction so i urge you if you get a chance if you can understand it in the original now do that have a look at some point um and if you can get it in translation when it comes out i think it's going to be something that you will find fascinating to look at it's hard for me to explain more about its literary qualities there is a custom of by the way to read a section of tikunesa from rosh hades to yom kippur and those who do that can tell me what they discover now i've got one minute left and i want to talk about there's one more book that's really going on a tangent here but it's such an interesting and fascinating uh book that um and and set of ideas that i just want to spend one minute talking about it and that is that around about the time of the tikunim the tikkunim is very much embedded in the universe of the tsar i mean some people think that the tikkunin was written through techniques of automatic writing one of the texts of the tikunim one of the texts of the tikunim is a famous text which ended up in the siddur not ended up but found its way into the sidor the liturgy of eastern and mystical communities and that of course is the famous essay patache liahu which is actually the second introduction of tikkunesar and it's given in what i call the kabbalistic sufic voice of tikkune zoar because it is fully and completely transcendent its language is transcendent its conception of god is transcendent it's the exact opposite of much of the anthropomorphism of the idris and the suffragettes and even anthropomorphism that finds its way into the tikkunim but the patakia essay is astonishing and uh louis jacobs actually argued that patagonia is there in to kind of reserve against the dangers of anthropomorphic thinking kabbalists are very very worried about people picking up the zohar and misunderstanding it but the book um i'm just going to talk about now is a book called sephirah who with a bit of hebrew could translate for me what is the meaning of sefer heart munna the big the book of the book the book of the picture the book of the picture now it's telling you many many many many things many things it's got phenomenal discourses on the relationship between the hebrew letters and the spherot that they are intimately bound up with and there's a lot to be said there gives us a whole theory of vision of mystical vision and what it is and what you're actually perceiving through kabbalistic ideas and kabbalistic consciousness but the big idea of sephirah that everybody talks about is this incredible idea and i'm going to finish with this this incredible idea that we talk in the tsar about how the divine has invested in history is very concerned with how the divine is invested in time time is cyclic now we know the big idea that came out especially from the school of the ramban and so on and you can see that in his commentary on on on the book of genesis that each of the thousand years since creation has represented one of the seven lower spherot the seven lower sphero to their own grouping we now differentiate the three higher ones from the seven lower ones by the time you get to the zohar there are all sorts of different configurations about how the spherical broken up but everybody acknowledges that time is dominated by the number seven we have seven days of the week we have seven years in a shmitah yep and we have seven shemitah in a yovel and the sephiroth tells us that of course the idea of that i was talking about you'll find in the ramban is the idea that each thousand years represents one of those fear art yep that's why we're told that by the year six thousand by the time we get to malhut we must have arrived at our messianic period but the sephirah tells you that that messianic period that you were waiting for that's just the messianic period of this shmitah there are seven cycles of this seven thousand and which sphero are we currently cycling through so we're obviously in yasad and we're coming to the end of yasod within this cycle the year five seven eight one we're coming towards the e6000 but of the uber cycle which of the spherot are we in and i'll tell you because when i when you when you read the sephirah and it tells you it sends the chill through you we're in gurah that is why our torah is the torah of the cycle 7000 year cycle before us said we have a torah of din our messianic period will be a messianic period of din of gevorah it'll be awesome it'll be awesome obviously it'll be nice to be around for the messianic period of tiferet and so on and so on until you get the big one and then possibly there's a cycle so this idea became kind of somehow infused in jewish thought as well the idea that that that there is a cosmic cycle and of course the sephirah is telling you that there are some special souls that cycle through each go through each cycle and are incarnated through each cycle to help precipitate the messianic period of each cycle the seventh millennium of each seven thousand year cycle so you have a complete reflection of the shabbat the reality is that most capitalists probably desire will tell you that our seven thousand year cycle is happening between the words tov and maod at the end of friday's description of the sixth day in the torain the first chapter of praise just before you get to value hashem god's making kurdish already yeah so it's shabbat which means everything gets complete so we get created that's tov and then mod is the tikkun of this seven thousand years which of course is the letters of adam so we have to take the mem from the beginning and put it at the end to become a dumb that's a whole kabbalistic splee going on there but it's the interesting question you are so there are time frames but i don't want to say who the messiah of the last period i don't i have to confess i don't remember i don't i mean maybe we were there i don't exactly remember who it was i'm pretty sure it wasn't me so i think i would have remembered that sorry oh you see that's a good question see that's a good question the question was did every or did all kabbalistic thinkers run with that idea about the seven cycles of seven thousand years and some did but the arie did not we're going to be talking about obviously talking about the arena next week please god and uh we can really only focus on the shifts that are happening so the main thing i wanted us to realize tonight was the way that the zohar completely explodes open the field of revelation and in fact gives us many of the concepts that we think uh uh uh are absolutely fundamental foundational to kabbalah itself the idea that there are souls of d with different levels the idea of gilgal reincarnation the idea of the four worlds the idea of adamic form above a damic form all of these ideas are very important and of course people are reading the zohar for nearly 300 years and no one's really really knowing what's going on especially a book like sephiroth and then obviously next week the arie is going to come along and once we understand the context of that then his own teachings will make a lot more sense and i hope that i can see some of you for that i look forward to it [Music] you

Channel: David Solomon

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Keywords: Jewish podcast, Jewish learning, Jewish ideas, ADAM QADMON, DAVID SOLOMON PODCAST, DIVINE EMANATION, DIVINE LIGHT, EIN SOF, ETZ CHAYIM, IGGULIM, JEWISH MYSTICISM, JEWS 16TH CENTURY, KABBALAH, KAVANNOT, LIMMUDEI ATZILUT, MALBUSH, MEDITATION, R MOSHE CORDOVERO, R. ISAAC LURIA, RAMAQ, RATIONAL EMANATIONS, SEFIROT, TEHIRU, TETRAGRAMMATON, THE ARI, THE ARIZAL, TIQUN, TOHU AND TIKKUN, TZIMTZUM, ZOHAR, KABBALAH CENTER, philosophy lecture, jewish education at home, JEWISH, JUDAISM

Id: vnhyJfwt-II

Length: 57min 39sec (3459 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 06 2021