Q: Who is the Creator?
A: The wisdom of Kabbalah, which studies the collective law of creation, uses words such as God, Creator, and Emanator, as technical names for forces, lights and degrees. The names, Creator and Emanator, are similar in definition.
For example: each upper degree is called “Creator” when relating to the degree below it, because the upper degree creates, controls, and develops the lower degree .
Creator is also a collective name for everything that exists, besides the souls, which are called “creatures.”
The Creator is a collective, special Force that monitors the whole system of creation. That Force is one and unique. In Kabbalah there is but one primary law – the law of creation, which is to delight the creatures in any way the creatures can be delighted. All other laws stem from that one law, and everything that happens does so in the carrying out of that law. Everything that happens at any given moment in creation, its sole purpose is to make people come to the point of utter bliss – to be filled with the Light of the Creator.
The Creator acts much like gravity: in the center of creation is the Creator. The souls were distanced five worlds away from Him. These include AK ( Adam Kadmon), Atzilut, Beria, Yetzira and Assiya, all the way to the farthest point called “our world.” From that last point, He pulls us toward Him.
We sense that pull as pain – beginning with disease and ending in painful death. But if we make an effort to approach the Creator by cooperating with that Force, we will not feel the pain. Instead, we will feel that Force as good. If, however, we refuse to go along with that pulling Force, we will feel pain, disease and other troubles to the same extent that we resist it.
The wisdom of Kabbalah enables us to realize ourselves in such a way that we will always, under any condition, be in accordance with that gravity, and thus come to the center of creation. That is the reason that Kabbalah is the most practical science for learning how to live well.
To equalize with the Creator means to be equal to Him in every manifestation. It does not refer to the Upper Force itself, but to how He relates to things, how He appears before us, within us, as a Supreme Power, as Essence, in the way that He wants us to feel Him.
The Creator created us through His wish to give, to bestow. He created our will to receive exactly in the amount that He wanted to give. That is why we must attain everything that He wants to give us – eternity, strength, perfection, total control. This means we must assume all the duties of the Creator.
The primary law of creation is the singularity of the Creator - the one and only power that controls everything. “There is none else beside Him.”
The second law of creation is that the Creator is totally benevolent. We cannot settle the contradiction between these two laws as they appear in our conception of reality.
To Kabbalists, this is not an “idea,” but a fact they discover within their sensation of the Creator. People cannot begin to understand how there could have been a holocaust if there is a Creator, because they do not feel Him! In fact, the benevolence of the Creator appears only in our corrected desires (vessels). If we are not corrected, then to the extent of the corruption compared to the Light, we will feel the opposite of the goodness of the Creator, feeling torment instead of happiness.
Q: Can you explain the terms Lishma and Lo Lishma?
A: Lishma (for Her name) and Lo Lishma (not for Her name): The depth of these terms is immeasurable.The essence of the term, Lishma, is found in the words themselves: all the efforts, the aims – only for the Creator. He is the one who receives the results of my efforts .
There is another term: “not in order to be rewarded,” which is at an even higher degree, when there seems to be no connection between me and the reward, when all the joy comes not to me, but to the Creator.
I am in the present, below the barrier, below the degree of Lishma. That is why I cannot understand the sentence “to work for someone else, without any benefit for myself.” After all, regardless of what I think of the reward, I always work for myself.