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The Ruin of the Second Temple Stemmed from Unfounded Hatred The exile after the ruin of the Second Temple stemmed from unfounded hatred, but it also served a twofold purpose. The first was that the exile was an incentive to further develop the correction method. Since Moses' Torah no longer sufficed to maintain the nation's spiritual level, it was time to "upgrade" the method. The second purpose of the exile was for Israel to mingle with the nations, to spread the "spiritual gene" throughout the world, and thus enable the correction of the whole of humanity, as Abraham initially intended. The Zohar and the Mishnah Around the time of the ruin of the Second Temple, two seminal corpuses were composed. One was the Mishnah, and the other was The Book of Zohar. While the former, along with the Bible, became the foundation of virtually all Jewish wisdom from that day on, the latter was concealed soon after its writing, and appeared more than a thousand years later in the hands of Rabbi Moses de Leon. The Writings of Our Sages The authors of the Mishnah, the Gemarah, and the rest of the writings of our sages, provided the exiled people of Israel with guidance on both the spiritual level, and the physical one. While the writings narrate spiritual states, they can just as readily be perceived as physical commandments. The Laws that Our Sages Instructed Because the laws that our sages instructed originated from spiritual laws, they were applicable in physical life, just as Israel had applied them prior to the ruin of the Temple. In this way, Jews maintained some level of connection with the spiritual level of the past, albeit without the actual attainment of the source and origin of the laws. The Reason for the Exile is the Ruin of the Temple Rabbi Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl wrote in regard to Israel's disconnect from the spiritual level and loss of attainment of the Creator: "The reason for the exile is the ruin of the Temple in general and in particular. Israel have [become] so corrupted that they caused the expulsion of Shechina [Divinity] from the general Temple. The particular [personal] Temple is within their hearts ... and through the departure from the particular Temple [Divinity] ... [they] departed from the general Temple and the exile arrived." The Shechina Departed Altogether In the same spirit, Jonathan Ben Natan Netah Eibshitz wrote: "In the First Temple, Divinity did not move from the Temple because the exile was for a short time. But in the second ruin, which is for a prolonged period of time, the Shechina [Divinity] departed altogether." Maintaining a Connection with Spirituality And while the majority of Jews focused on maintaining connection with spirituality on the level instructed to them by the sages of the Mishnah and the Gemarah, there have always been those exceptional few who simply could not settle for blind observance of commandments. The questions that drove Abraham to discover the Creator were burning within them; their points in the heart had not quenched, and they were driven to the deepest of all studies, the wisdom of Kabbalah. And now I would like to invite you to receive FREE Instant Access to Like A Bundle of Reeds: A must-Read book on what it means to be Jewish today. You can access this FREE eBook anytime at: http://www.BundleofReeds.com
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the mishnah, spiritual laws, jewish exile, book of zohar, jewish exiles, jewish wisdom, spiritual states, kabbalah, what is spirituality, spiritual development,
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