R' Ashlag Ch. 29 (sect. 2)

Rabbi Yehudah Ashlag's "Introduction to the Zohar"

-- as translated and commented on by Rabbi Yaakov Feldman

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29.

2.


"(That explains) for example, why a newborn only wants the smallest of things and no more, and why (to the contrary) our other side’s ratzon l’kabel grows stronger and stronger when it gets what it wants, and even wants twice as much. And why it intensifies to such an extent that it immediately wants *four times* as much when it’s given double."

-- That is, while we're very willing and eager to take-in when we're born, indeed; the urge is nonetheless comparatively weak then, because we're only drawing upon our native ratzon l’kabel at that point. But our willingness to take-in invariably will grow exponentially stronger from there on, because we begin to draw upon the sort of deeper, more impure levels of ratzon l’kabel cited before.

"(That comes to teach us that) if we don't manage to overcome that (urge to take in more and more) through Torah and mitzvot, and to purify the ratzon l’kabel and transform it into a willingness to bestow, that our ratzon l’kabel will grow stronger and stronger throughout our life, and we'll eventually die without fulfilling half our desires -- which is regarded as being left under the auspices of the other side and the husks, whose very function is to expand and increase our ratzon l’kabel, and to broaden it and take away all its restraints, so as to provide us with all the material we need to work with and rectify."

-- Hence, we're to know that the only way to change the cakey, bloated, wily entity that is our comprehensive ratzon l’kabel into a G-dly, selfless, blameless one is to transform it into a comprehensive willingness to bestow. Otherwise it will only grow fatter and fatter till it pops. And we do that by subsuming ourselves in the mitzvah-system which demands selfless acquiescence to G-d's will.
-- But we're never to forget that we're only put through all that in order to prove ourselves valiant in battle; and that the grist for the whole alternately delectable and terrible mill that is the ratzon l’kabel is only there to "provide us with all the material we need to work with and rectify".

(c) 2005 Rabbi Yaakov Feldman

(Feel free to contact me at feldman@torah.org )

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