Wednesday, August 31, 2016

“These Ten” p:51

AyinBase / Ayin Beis with R' Paltiel, Menachem Av 5776 



Page 51 of the pamphlet – (below middle line of the page. Line starts: 'במ׳א') [page 38 in the book]. For text see below.

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Even though there are 10 sphirot which indicates structure and an 'external aim', at the same time it needs to be understood that these 10 are rooted within the Emanator Himself.

Before the emanation and revelation of these 10 sphirot, they were contained within the Infinite Emanator – these are the 10 hidden sphirot.


They contain His intent/kavanah. Intent/kavanah is different from will/ratzon. The intent is an inner projection and not about any external result.


And they do not develop sequentially. They have one intent. That is to fulfill His intent. And together they reveal it – none can bring it out independently of the others.


Tuesday, August 30, 2016

“He Started the Whole Thing....!” p:51

AyinBase / Ayin Beis with R' Paltiel, Menachem Av 5776 



Page 51 of the pamphlet – (at about middle line of the page. Line starts: 'אצל...') [page 38 in the book]. For text see below.

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We have been looking at the metaphor of mentor and student. The point is to investigate the effect of the tzimtzum/contraction on ohr/light.

Light is always connected to its source. So how does the contraction/tzimtzum affect it and thus enable it to come into the world in a way that it will be constructive?

The mentor has the light in a way that is beyond presentation. But he can identify certain specifics the he can present to his student.


These specific details are totally illuminated by the light and via these particulars the mentor/mashpia can present the sechel/light to the student.


This is like the 10 sphirot and the inner intent of the One that emanates [מאציל].

As a result of the emanation of the 10 sphirot the intent is expressed.

This is so He should do goodness to His creations and they should recognize His greatness.

This is inner motivated. It is due to His will, not due to solicitation from elsewhere or from below... He started the whole thing....!

The 10 hidden sphirot are like the details that are hidden within the mashpia.


Monday, August 29, 2016

“Nothing Compares to You” p:51

AyinBase / Ayin Beis with R' Paltiel, Menachem Av 5776 



Page 51 of the pamphlet – (8th line of the page. Line starts: 'veharuchniut...') [page 38 in the book]. For text see below.

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Every sechel/mind has internal content.

The details are in a fine, spiritual state in the mashpia/mentor.

The light shines through the details. Light/ohr means the reality and truth of the essence.


By contrast the pratim/details are in a more defined/designed state of the in the mind of the student – they are dressed in the levushim ha-sechel (garments of the mind).


Even after the student received all the details and the 'topic' shines through, yet the details are not in as refined state with full illumination as is the case with the mashpia/mentor (since each entity retains its own presence as well).


Sunday, August 28, 2016

“It Is What It Is” p:51

AyinBase / Ayin Beis with R' Paltiel, Menachem Av 5776 



Page 51 of the pamphlet – (6th line of the page. Line starts: 'sichli...') [page 38 in the book]. For text see below.

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For the mentor/mashpia all the details are known from the 'inside'. The transfer to the student/recipient is not 'all at once'.

It is by means of the particulars.


Don't confuse structural components with essential components. The mind/sechel of the mentor contains the truth of soul itself. It is not composite.


The sechel/mind – that is soul/neshamah.

The particulars don't build the sechel – they are contained in the sechel.



Friday, August 26, 2016

“Student Life” p:50

AyinBase / Ayin Beis with R' Paltiel, Menachem Av 5776

Page 50 of the pamphlet – (Middle of the page. Line starts: 'lo...') [page 38 in the book]. For text see below.

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For the mentor/mashpia all the details are known from the 'inside'. On the other hand for the student/recipient, only a few of the particulars are know, and the ultimate principle [inyan sichli] is still not know to him.


In each detail the ultimate point is represented.


All the particulars together allow the principle to surface for the student/recipient. This is the essence of the principle/sechel that becomes know from these particulars.

The student has a 'eureka' experience - 'of course, I see it' and he comes to it via the specific points [and Q & A sessions], but what he gets to see is above all the details.

Sechel/mind is a spark. It is beyond the human experience. It is created by the human being because he has a soul and brings the soul light into the world.


Monday, August 22, 2016

“Soul Knows; Like Light From the Sun” p:51

AyinBase / Ayin Beis with R' Paltiel, Menachem Av 5776

Page 51 of the pamphlet – (5th line of the page. Line starts: 'meyhu-inyan...') [page 38 in the book]. For text see below.

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Questions are based on understanding. It is a quest to make the vision of chochmah/wisdom accessible to understanding.

We are looking at the mashal of the mashpiah/mentor and student.


We are used to a very external element of mind/sechel. Real sechel flows from the soul like light from the sun.


Soul knows that everything has a place. Everything is meant to be. It is not by default. How does the soul know it? Why don't the idiots know it? Because they believe the world evolved and that people came from monkeys. The soul knows that the world is a Godly creation and that everything has its place.

Sechel is the flow from the soul/nefesh.

The mentor is mentoring sechel/mind in his student. The mentor/mashpia has lived through this sechel/mind with his entire being.

And he teaches the student via the specifics – the pratim/details.


Sunday, August 21, 2016

“Infinity Downloaded” p:50-51

AyinBase / Ayin Beis with R' Paltiel, Menachem Av 5776 



Page 50 of the pamphlet – (halfway into the page. Line starts: 'mipratim...') [page 38 in the book]. For text see below.

Questions, comments, or to join our Whatsapp Group:

Questions are based on understanding. It is a quest to make the vision of chochmah/wisdom accessible to understanding.


For the mentor/mashpia the teaching he gives is unified with him. He has absorbed the sechel/mind, till it became his. He is telling you what he is experiencing in his own being. And he teaches this to a student who has not started on this path.


So the mentor has to break it down to a particular piece that that student can relate to.


The mashpia presents the point in parts – but each part is true unto itself and relates back to the original source.

Friday, August 19, 2016

“Life in The Details” p:50

AyinBase / Ayin Beis with R' Paltiel, Menachem Av 5776 



Page 50 of the pamphlet – (halfway into the page. Line starts: 'pratim...') [page 38 in the book]. For text see below.

Questions, comments, or to join our Whatsapp Group:

Questions are based on understanding. It is a quest to make the vision of chochmah/wisdom accessible to understanding.

Sechel needs to have particulars since it reveals something within the worldly level.

A mentor/mashpia who has delved into the human condition more deeply is able to present the depth and the details to his studends. The student receives the new view via the particulars that the mentor will identify for him.


An example of this is how to eat properly in the company of others. There are a myriad of details, but the mentor gives him the details in a way that it points the student to the main idea of human dignity.


Thursday, August 18, 2016

Vocation פרשת ואתחנן

Previously Rabbi Paltiel gave the example of how the head of the company provides vision and direction qualitatively different from that of the employees and officers.
Here below is a piece written by Rabbi Sacks regarding purpose in a business environment and beyond…
In a much watched TED talk Simon Sinek asked the question: how do great leaders inspire action?1 What made people like Martin Luther King and Steve Jobs stand out from their contemporaries who may have been no less gifted, no less qualified? His answer: Most people talk about what. Some people talk about how. Great leaders, though, start with why. This is what makes them transformative.2
Sinek’s lecture was about business and political leadership. The most powerful examples, though, are directly or indirectly religious. Indeed I argued in The Great Partnership what makes Abrahamic monotheism different is that it believes there is an answer to the question, why. Neither the universe nor human life is meaningless, an accident, a mere happenstance. As Freud, Einstein and Wittgenstein all said, religious faith is faith in the meaningfulness of life.
Rarely is this shown in a more powerful light than in Va'etchanan. There is much in Judaism about what: what is permitted, what forbidden, what is sacred, what is secular. There is much, too, about how: how to learn, how to pray, how to grow in our relationship with God and with other people. There is relatively little about why.
In Va-etchanan Moses says some of the most inspiring words ever uttered about the why of Jewish existence. That is what made him the great transformational leader he was, and it has consequences for us, here, now.
To have a sense of how strange Moses’ words were, we must recall several facts. The Israelites were still in the desert. They had not yet entered the land. They had no military advantages over the nations they would have to fight. Ten of the twelve spies had argued, almost forty years before, that the mission was impossible. In a world of empires, nations and fortified cities, the Israelites must have seemed to the untutored eye defenceless, unproven, one more horde among the many who swept across Asia and Africa in ancient times. Other than their religious practices, few contemporary observers would have seen anything about them to set them apart from the Jebusites and Perizzites, Midianites and Moabites, and the other petty powers that populated that corner of the Middle East.
Yet in this week’s parsha Moses communicated an unshakeable certainty that what had happened to them would eventually change and inspire the world. Listen to his language:
Ask now about the former days, long before your time, from the day God created human beings on the earth; ask from one end of the heavens to the other. Has anything so great as this ever happened, or has anything like it ever been heard of?  Has any other people heard the voice of God speaking out of fire, as you have, and lived?  Has any god ever tried to take for himself one nation out of another nation by miracles, signs and wonders, by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, or by great and awesome deeds, like all the things the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes? (Deut. 4:32-34)
Moses was convinced that Jewish history was, and would remain, unique. In an age of empires, a small, defenceless group had been liberated from the greatest empire of all by a power not their own, by God himself. That was Moses’ first point: the singularity of Jewish history as a narrative of redemption.
His second was the uniqueness of revelation:
What other nation is so great as to have their gods near them the way the Lord our God is near us whenever we pray to him? And what other nation is so great as to have such righteous decrees and laws as this body of laws I am setting before you today? (Deut. 4:7-8)
Other nations had gods to whom they prayed and offered sacrifices. They too attributed their military successes to their deities. But no other nation saw God as their sovereign, legislator and law-giver. Elsewhere law represented the decree of the king or, in more recent centuries, the will of the people. In Israel, uniquely, even when there was a king, he had no legislative power. Only in Israel was God seen not just as a power but as the architect of society, the orchestrator of its music of justice and mercy, liberty and dignity.
The question is why. Toward the end of the chapter Moses gives one answer: “Because He loved your ancestors and chose their descendants after them.” (Deut. 4:37). God loved Abraham, not least because Abraham loved God. And God loved Abraham’s children because they were his children and He had promised the patriarch that He would bless and protect them.
Earlier though Moses had given a different kind of answer, not incompatible with the second, but different:
See, I have taught you decrees and laws as the Lord my God commanded me … Observe them carefully, for this is your wisdom and understanding in the eyes of the nations, who will hear about all these decrees and say, “Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.” (Deut. 4:5-6)
Why did Moses, or God, care whether or not other nations saw Israel’s laws as wise and understanding? Judaism was and is a love story between God and a particular people, often tempestuous, sometimes serene, frequently joyous, but close, intimate, even inward-looking. What has the rest of the world to do with it?
But the rest of the world does have something to do with it. Judaism was never meant for Jews alone. In his first words to Abraham, God already said, “I will bless those who bless you, and those who curse you, I will curse; through you all the families of the earth will be blessed” (Gen. 12:3). Jews were to be a source of blessing to the world.
God is the God of all humanity. In Genesis He spoke to Adam, Eve, Cain, Noah, and made a covenant with all humankind before He made one with Abraham. In Egypt, whether in Potiphar’s house, or prison, or Pharaoh’s palace, Joseph continually talked about God. He wanted the Egyptians to know that nothing he did, he did himself. He was merely an agent of the God of Israel. There is nothing here to suggest that God is indifferent to the nations of the world.
Later in the days of Moses, God said that He would perform signs and wonders so that “The Egyptians will know that I am the Lord” (Ex. 7:5). He called Jeremiah to be “a prophet to the nations.” He sent Jonah to the Assyrians in Nineveh. He had Amos deliver oracles to the other nations before He sent him an oracle about Israel. In perhaps the most astonishing prophecy in Tanakh He sent Isaiah the message that a time will come when God will bless Israel’s enemies: “The Lord Almighty will bless them, saying, ‘Blessed be Egypt My people, Assyria My handiwork, and Israel My inheritance’” (Is. 19:25).
God is concerned with all humanity. Therefore what we do as Jews makes a difference to humanity, not just in a mystical sense, but as exemplars of what it means to love and be loved by God. Other nations would look at Jews and sense that some larger power was at work in their history. As the late Milton Himmelfarb put it:
 Each Jew knows how thoroughly ordinary he is; yet taken together, we seem caught up in things great and inexplicable . . . The number of Jews in the world is smaller than a small statistical error in the Chinese census. Yet we remain bigger than our numbers. Big things seem to happen around us and to us.3
We were not called on to convert the world. We were called on to inspire the world. As the prophet Zechariah put it, a time will come when “Ten people from all languages and nations will take firm hold of one Jew by the hem of his robe and say, ‘Let us go with you, because we have heard that God is with you’” (Zech. 8:23). Our vocation is to be God’s ambassadors to the world, giving testimony through the way we live that it is possible for a small people to survive and thrive under the most adverse conditions, to construct a society of law-governed liberty for which we all bear collective responsibility, and to “act justly, love mercy  and walk humbly”4 with our God. Va-etchanan is the mission statement of the Jewish people.
And others were and still are inspired by it. The conclusion I have drawn from a lifetime lived in the public square is that non-Jews respect Jews who respect Judaism. They find it hard to understand why Jews, in countries where there is genuine religious liberty, abandon their faith or define their identity in purely ethnic terms.
Speaking personally, I believe that the world in its current state of turbulence needs the Jewish message, which is that God calls on us to be true to our faith and a blessing to others regardless of their faith. Imagine a world in which everyone believed this. It would be a world transformed.
We are not just another ethnic minority. We are the people who predicated freedom on teaching our children to love, not hate. Ours is the faith that consecrated marriage and the family, and spoke of responsibilities long before it spoke of rights. Ours is the vision that sees alleviation of poverty as a religious task because, as Maimonides said, you cannot think exalted spiritual thoughts if you are starving or sick or homeless and alone.5 We do these things not because we are conservative or liberal, Republicans or Democrats, but because we believe that is what God wants of us.
Much is written these days about the what and how of Judaism, but all too little about the why. Moses, in the last month of his life, taught the why. That is how the greatest of leaders inspired action from his day to ours.
If you want to change the world, start with why.
2  For a more detailed account, see the book based on the talk: Simon Sinek, Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action. New York, Portfolio, 2009.
3  Milton Himmelfarb and Gertrude Himmelfarb. Jews and Gentiles. New York, Encounter, 2007, 141.
4  Micah 6:8.
5  The Guide for the Perplexed, III: 27.

“Higher Than Himself” p:50

AyinBase / Ayin Beis with R' Paltiel, Menachem Av 5776 



Page 50 of the pamphlet – (quarter into the page. Line starts: 'ach...') [page 38 in the book]. For text see below.

Questions, comments, or to join our Whatsapp Group:

We are dealing the principle of tzimtzum/contraction and its effect on light/ohr.

However much light is lessened it still expresses its connection to source.

So what is the meaning of contraction/restriction in regard to light?

There is the Creator and the created. The created has a beginning – it is not primary. The Creator does not have this. Thus the created cannot really relate to the Creator. It can recognize there is a Creator and that's about it.

We say there was a tzimtzum, but no matter what you do, light remains unified with the Creator – so how does it work?


Names help bring the light to a state where it can be related to by world.


Sechel/mind is the recognition of the truth of something that is higher than it.

The human mandate did not originate from himself. It is given from Above. The human mandate is not invented by man, it is a sense of responsibility – a response to Him.

Rulership is rooted in something much higher than the 'fact of it' – it is rooted in a higher purpose.





Wednesday, August 17, 2016

“Like Light from The Sun: This is How We Live” p:50

AyinBase / Ayin Beis with R' Paltiel, Menachem Av 5776 



Page 50 of the pamphlet – (quarter into the page. Line starts: 'kitzur...') [page 38 in the book]. For text see below.

Questions, comments, or to join our Whatsapp Group:

We are dealing with the question of what is contraction/tzimtzum when applied to light/ohr?

There is great significance in this question.


Sechel/mind is light.


Sechel comes from the soul the same way light comes from the sun – it is not solicited.