What Is the Secret of the Book of Zohar?
The secret of The Book of Zohar is that if you relate correctly to the book, you attract the reforming light from the spiritual heights that it describes.
The reforming light is a force dwelling in nature that we attract when we read Kabbalistic texts. This force can act on us either as a potion of life or a potion of death, depending on how we relate to the material we read.
However, why was specifically The Zohar forbidden, along with a few other Kabbalistic scriptures, and not Kabbalistic texts such as the Torah, the Tanach, the Talmud and the Mishnah?
It is because The Zohar contains the most powerful and highest light, and if we remain in our inborn egoistic nature without approaching the text with the intention to correct our egoism, i.e., to change our inner programming from a constant drive for self-benefit to one of benefiting others and nature, then our aim to use this immense force for self-serving purposes turns it into a potion of death.
What does it mean that the text becomes “a potion of death”? We can see that even with the ordinary Torah, if we use it with egoistic intentions, then thoughts of self-righteousness, uniqueness and greatness surface in us. That is when the Torah becomes a potion of death, because it then solely acts to inflate our egos.
However, if we approach the text with the aim to correct our egoistic intention, and acquire an intention to love, bestow and positively connect in its place, then the light contained in The Zohar turns into a potion of life. It then helps us attain spiritual vessels, i.e., a new intention to love, to bestow, and to positively connect to each other and with nature.
After a period of its prohibition, why, then, is The Book of Zohar and the wisdom of Kabbalah in general being revealed en masse in our times? It is because today the need has emerged in masses of people to discover the meaning of life. To Kabbalists, words such as “prohibition” and “forbidden” hold the same meaning as “impossible.” That is, if no desire to discover the meaning of life and a willingness for self-transformation to do so emerges in people, then it is impossible for such people to approach these lofty texts in any beneficial and effective manner.
However, since desires constantly grow over the generations, more and more people today have thus been granted highly-developed desires capable of processing this wisdom in a manner that can develop their desire for spirituality, and not to increase their egoistic desires. It is written that at the end of days, this wisdom would emerge for the correction of the world, when the world would become ready for correction, i.e., when lots of people would become ready to work on attaining an intention of love and bestowal in the place of the inborn egoistic intention.
Therefore, today we can start discovering the originally intended purpose of The Zohar, as a means for bringing about corrections in our attitudes to each other and to nature in general. Kabbalists of our era, such as the great Kabbalist Yehuda Ashlag (Baal HaSulam), say that the time has come for the expansion of this wisdom and for the revelation of The Book of Zohar to the world.
Our generation is the generation of the days of the Messiah. This is why we have been granted the redemption of our holy land from the hands of the foreigners. We have also been rewarded with the revelation of The Book of Zohar, which is the beginning of the realization of the verse (Jeremiah 31):
“And they shall teach no more each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know Me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them.”
— Kabbalist Yehuda Ashlag (Baal HaSulam), “A Speech for the Completion of The Zohar.”