Zigzags Along The Spiritual Path

The Torah, “Numbers,” 21:4 – 21:6: They journeyed from Mount Hor by way of the Red Sea to circle the land of Edom, and the people became disheartened because of the way. The people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in this desert, for there is no bread and no water, and we are disgusted with this rotten bread.” The Lord sent against the people the venomous snakes, and they bit the people and many people of Israel died.

Once again we see the next correction of the initial egoistic desires. Some of them are already corrected, let’s say, on the levels of the root phase and levels one and two, while the deeper egoistic levels are corrected now.

Question: Why do we need these turning points? It seems that everything is fine and suddenly the people come complaining again and again!

Answer: The correction is fulfilled according to the same rules as the slalom: you follow a course to an end point, but constantly zigzagging, you can’t go directly. When an athlete skis down the mountain he has to zigzag, otherwise he would fly down the mountain. It is the same when he climbs the mountain. This is the reason that everything we have seen now repeats over and over again but on a different level. Moreover, if before it seemed that we were performing good deeds and thus advancing, now we discover that we had performed bad deeds and must correct them.

For example, a person who studied Kabbalah wrote books about it. No matter how you look at it, he is not corrected yet and it is his ego speaking in him. I remember the pains I felt when I wrote and rewrote my first books over and over again. You cannot imagine how it raises a person, ignites him and makes him feel satisfied expecting this bestowal and this receiving. On the one hand, he performs some work, but when he raises himself he needs to correct everything afterward. This means that you ascend upward; that is, you ascend but you will have to correct these zigzags!

This is life. You cannot tell a person that it would be better if he did nothing. This prolongs the path. Looking at it from the outside, you see that it’s fate; there’s no getting around it: a person performs his intended path, which has a starting and ending point. He can not avoid such zigzags.

In this area our ego grows, and then we have to correct it by making great efforts. This is great additional work we spend years on. But at the same time we are expanding its correction, including all that we do in our egoism, which expands it.

It is actually by such zigzags that the correction is carried out.
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From KabTV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 7/1/15