Remember how we started? First there was Adam, one soul. Adam was a good soul, wanting only to give to the Creator. But he misjudged his ability to give to the Creator, and that mistake cost him—and, consequently, us—heavily. He broke. His soul shattered into 600,000 pieces, which still today continue to break, hence the billions of people inhabiting our world. All of them are tiny fragments of the original soul.
The beauty of it is that each of us is both a particular soul and a piece in the puzzle of Adam ha Rishon. Within us are all the pieces of that first soul, just as every cell in our body contains all the genetic information to create a whole new identical body or a part of a hologram contains the entire image.
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Tidbits
Here’s the Kabbalistic explanation for the overpopulation on our planet. Our egoism keeps growing and becomes increasingly difficult to correct. The only way to correct it is by “splitting” it to tiny bits. For the egoism to correct, it needs to “dress” in a physical body. Thus, the number of people in the world is the number of fragments of the common soul (Adam) we currently need to correct.
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But to realize that we are one soul, we have to want to feel this way. This simple rule runs throughout Kabbalah and spirituality: no coercion. In other words, you don’t get what you don’t want to get.
The cells in our bodies don’t “think” about how they work together. They just function as one unit. We wouldn’t make it past the first week of pregnancy if it hadn’t been this way. Indeed, biology provides a perfect model for what Kabbalah describes as the common soul.
When a baby grows in its mother’s womb, the minute cells begin to differentiate, a beautiful thing happens—they begin to communicate and cooperate with one another. The more differentiated they become, the more they are forced to cooperate. A liver cell can’t do what a kidney cell does, so the kidney cleans up the toxins that the liver can’t, and the liver creates the new cells that the kidney can’t. This way, they are different but cooperating, and every part of the body benefits as a result.
The Time of Togetherness
Just like our bodies, our souls can work cooperatively. We can live as separate units, just as there are unicellular creatures, but we all know that unicellular creatures are at the low end of nature’s pyramid. The creatures at the top of the pyramid are multicellular creatures. Each cell in their bodies performs only one function, and all the cells collaborate to sustain the organism.
Kabbalists of the past attained spirituality on their own because they were unique souls with unique tasks, hence the fantastic nature of their achievements. But it’s different today. Now that Kabbalah is open to all and studied by many, it’s a safe bet that most of us will attain nothing individually. As a unit, however, we can achieve far more than has ever been achieved before.
For this reason, contemporary Kabbalists stress the importance of dispersing the knowledge of Kabbalah. They want the world to know so that more “cells” will join in the collective work of the soul, the spiritual body.