READING: BETWEEN AFTER MIDNINGHT AND DAWN WEDNESDAY

Baal HaSulam. Shamati, 24. He Will Save Them from the Hand of the Wicked

LESSON MATERIAL

24. He Will Save Them from the Hand of the Wicked

I heard on Av 5, July 25, 1944, at the completion of The Zohar

It is written, “You who love the Lord, hate evil … He will save them from the hand of the wicked.” He asks, “What is the connection between ‘hate evil’ and ‘He will save them from the hand of the wicked?’”

In order to understand this, we must first bring the words of our sages, “The world was created either for complete righteous or for complete evil.” He asks, “Is it worthwhile to create the world for complete evil, but not worthwhile for incomplete righteous?”

He answers that from the perspective of the Creator, there is nothing in the world that has two meanings. It is only from the perspective of the receivers, according to the sensation of the receivers. This means that either the receivers feel a good taste in the world, or they feel a terribly bitter taste in the world, since with every act they do, they calculate it in advance when they do it, since no act is done purposelessly. Either they want to improve their present state or to harm someone. But purposeless things are not worthy of a purposeful operator.

Hence, those who accept the modes of conduct of the Creator in the world determine it as good or bad depending on how they feel: as either good or bad. Because of this, “you who love the Lord,” who understand that the purpose of creation was to do good to His creations, in order for them to come to feel it, they understand that it is received precisely by Dvekut [adhesion] and nearing the Creator.

Thus, if they feel any remoteness from the Creator, they call it “bad.” In that state, one considers oneself evil, since an intermediary state does not exist in reality. In other words, either one feels the existence of the Creator and His guidance, or one imagines that “The earth is given into the hand of the wicked.”

Since one feels about himself that he is a man of truth, meaning that he cannot deceive himself and say that he feels when he does not feel, hence, he immediately begins to cry to the Creator to have mercy on him and deliver him from the authority of the Sitra Achra [other side] and from all the foreign thoughts. Because he is crying earnestly, the Creator hears his prayer. (Perhaps this is the meaning of “The Lord is near to all who call upon Him in truth.”) At that time, “He delivers them from the hand of the wicked.”

As long as one does not feel one’s true self, meaning the measure of one’s evil to a sufficient level to awaken him to cry to the Creator out of the affliction that he feels with his recognition of evil, he is still unworthy of redemption since he has not yet revealed the Kli [vessel] for hearing the prayer, called “from the bottom of the heart.”

This is so because one still thinks that there is some good in him, meaning he does not descend to the bottom of the heart. In the bottom of the heart, he thinks that he still has some good, and he does not notice with what love and fear he relates to the Torah and the Mitzvot [commandments]. This is why he does not see the truth.