Workshop In A Circle And Practical Kabbalah – Part 4

The Kabbalistic Meal

Question: What is special about the Kabbalistic meal?

Answer: The meal is the most difficult action in Kabbalah because during it a person must feel himself as being together with the others in a common connection and loving them. He wants everyone to enjoy the good tastes that he now experiences.

There should be such a common connection between them that a person enjoys, not the taste of food, but the fact that they eat together and that this is what fills him. The main taste is not in the treats themselves but in the fact that now we are filling each other with our mutual relationship, love, connection, and unity.

It turns out that, during the meal, a person experiences great inner tension. After all, he must constantly control with what intention he is taking every bite, putting the spoon into his mouth, chewing, swallowing, as well as feeling the tastes while chewing, swallowing, and digesting the food.

Thus, he is in the process of receiving the Light into his spiritual Kli (vessel), in connection with all the others because the spiritual consumption of food is common to all and not only to each one individually.

Therefore, each one must feel that he eats the food together with everybody else as one man with the same mouth, with one tongue, one palate, and one throat. He chews with 32 teeth, which means he clarifies 32 streams of wisdom (the Light of Hochma).

When he swallows, he feels not the taste of the food but the taste of performing the action together with everyone. He transforms this material action into the reception of Light into the spiritual Partzuf for the sake of bestowal. If he does so with respect to everyone, then he can also be sure that he does it together with the Creator. Therefore, a meal is a very difficult spiritual action and requires much higher attainment than a workshop or a gathering of friends.

All in all, there are three actions performed by a Kabbalistic group that aims toward unification: a workshop, a gathering of friends, and a meal.

The goal of all of these actions is to connect the person with the rest of the group so that he ceases to feel himself as a separate element, dissolves in the group, and becomes included in everyone as a whole. Thus, he loses his egoistic individuality and receives the entire common Kli, the quality of bestowal, that all the others also have.

He exits his egoism and becomes included in the friends, feeling that there is nothing but them. As he loses himself, he enters the spiritual world, the sensation of the Creator, that is, the elevation to another nature based on bestowal and love.
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From KabTV’s “A New Life” 7/20/17