When miners dig coal in China, the air in California gets polluted. When emissions from American cars dissolve in the air, the ice in Greenland melts. And when the ice in Greenland melts, the sea level rises and The Netherlands sinks.
It boils down to this: we are all part of the global village, and our actions affect one another.
Through Thick and Through Thin
Of all the values you and I hold dear, the one we probably cherish most is privacy. We’d all like to have a piece of private property.
Back in Chapter 5, we said that there are five levels of desire: inanimate, vegetative, animate, human, and spiritual. We also said that there was once a single soul, called Adam, which broke into myriad fractions, which then dressed in physical bodies in our world. This is why we have so many people on planet Earth.
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Spiritual Sparks
This entire reality, Upper and lower, is one … and was emanated and created by a Single Thought. That Single Thought is the essence of all the operations, the purpose. It is, by itself, the entire perfection, the "One, Unique, and Unified."
—Rav Yehuda Ashlag, The Study of the Ten Sefirot
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But no matter how far we feel from one another, we are still that one soul, Adam. If a brain cell is oblivious to a blood cell, it doesn’t mean that it can live without it. Without the blood cells bringing food and oxygen to the brain, the brain cells would die—and so would the blood cells. So would we.
Through thick and through thin, united we stand and united we fall because united we are, already.
Assuming Responsibility
Consider this: A newborn baby is responsible for nothing. How can it be? Because it cannot think about things and process them, because it cannot understand the world it experiences, a baby cannot be held responsible.
But an older child is already responsible for something, even if it’s just to remember to put the sandwich in the lunchbox or to take the dog out at the end of a school day. A youth is already responsible for many more things, and a young adult is expected to take full responsibility for his or her life.
When we grow and have kids, we become responsible for others, too. But what if we were responsible for every single human being on Earth? What if that responsibility was not only to the people alive today, but also to all the people, animals, plants, and minerals that have ever lived since the moment of creation and to all eternity? This is the meaning of spiritual responsibility.
Now, this responsibility may sound like a heavy load, but what if that responsibility was not the result of some mean schoolteacher wishing to torment his students with an assignment they can’t perform? What if it were simply the result of love?
We love our children, so responsibility for their well-being is not only natural, but welcome. What if we felt the same kind of love and care that we feel for our children toward the whole world and everything in it—toward all the creatures that ever lived, that are alive today, and that will be alive at any time in the future? That immense love is spiritual bliss. Kabbalah helps us experience this immense love, and make it inherent in our nature.