One Must Love One’s Neighbor

Question: The Creator is love. When you first came to your teacher Rabash did you somehow connect Kabbalah with love?

Answer: No. Before I came to Rabash, and even with him at first, Kabbalah, in my view, was identified with a purely dry, rigid science that I needed to master.

Question: What was your reaction when you first heard the fact that one must love one’s neighbor?

Answer: I reacted to it as some kind of addition: “This is probably how it is manifested.” I understood that these words were earthly, very limited, very shallow, and based on non-spiritual, material qualities. I explained spiritual love to myself as an aspiration to something exalted, the opportunity to belong to this ideal.

The principle of “love your neighbor as yourself” should be realized in the ten. We must take it in its real live form and realize it between us. Then we will be able to achieve this. We need to try and do this as quickly as possible, before all sorts of natural suffering make us move to this by a long and painful path.
[217273]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 6/8/17