The Book Is A Guide

Question: They say that Kabbalistic books have a special power? What is this power?

Answer: Both of my parents were doctors. There was a big guest room full of bookcases in the center of the house where I grew up.
As I grew, I was able to take books from the higher shelves. This is how I read everything, shelf after shelf, book after book, and developed in this way.

I see in my grandchildren that today there is no such craving for books. Such an approach to books has disappeared from the world. Even I, a representative of the older generation and accustomed to books, lately, more and more often, read texts from the computer screen.

However, I am not really upset by the fact that books may disappear from this world. After all, I think that the world is coming into big changes and that we are approaching the notion of a “spiritual book” and not a material one that is printed on paper.

The volumes that we buy, leaf through, hold in our hands, and read are not really books. A book means revelation. By reading a text, I must reveal its inner meaning, its secret code, so that the book can begin to play within me. I should become a screen on which I reveal the inner essence of the world.

This means that a book is not pages with symbols printed on them. A book is a code written in letters and conveying through them an upper wisdom, a secret knowledge of the world, unfolding within a person. Then a person turns into a book, into a story, into this place where the knowledge that the writer wanted to convey is revealed.

Therefore, I do not worry that material books are being replaced by electronic ones. For me, as a Kabbalist, the concept of a book is a message conveyed to a person by a sage who revealed the inner essence of the world.

The sage passes information about the upper world through special symbols: the 27 letters of the [Hebrew] alphabet. With the help of these letters, a person begins to decipher within himself the entire cipher passed to him by a writer. However, this only pertains to Kabbalistic books.

Lately, our world is undergoing a big transformation because it has to rise to a higher degree, from the animalistic level to the human one, where we will begin to feel the real world in which we live. Physicists and other scientists are already talking about this. Therefore, the usual books that we are accustomed to will gradually disappear and soon we will begin to reveal the world within us; precisely this revelation we will call “a book.”

The form of a book is not important—whether it is paper or electronic—the main thing is where it is revealed. A book is revealed within a person. He reads a written text, but a book begins to sound in him, to draw in him forms and pictures of the other world.

Question: When I read a normal book—a novel, for example—I am also impressed, imagine to myself various pictures, and see myself instead of the character in the book. How is the reading of Kabbalistic books different?

Answer: Kabbalistic books are different because we see characters from another world in them. This is the difference between regular and holy books. “Holy” means “separate,” that is, through the reading of it, we begin to feel reality, which is separate from our world.

Gradually everyone, without exception, will have to move to this upper reality, to the new dimension. The guide that takes us to the new reality is called a book.

A book is not a cover with sheets of paper but an inner revelation within a person. We just need to know how to read it!
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From KabTV’s “Kabbalah Time” 6/13/17