# 3. Baal Shem Tov, Insights. 5/7/2013

his joy in his life and he has all of his friends his friends don't know what a king doesn't don't know the king don't know what it's like to be receiving this good news but he he can't celebrate in his own so he goes to the crechement to the bar and he and all of his friends he says it's you know the drinks are on me tonight and everybody is celebrating they're celebrating because they're drunk and he's celebrating because his father is coming together says when we celebrate on like a Shabbos we're celebrating the body of celebrating because it has challenged it has a little whiskey that's whatever it is it feels good but the soul is celebrating Shoppers will get the letter from above the system coming to take you back while Santa is like like showing us the beginning of that the other the body that we see as the other needs to be part of the celebration and this story there's still an another the the people that surround the prince and his exiled State Community are people who don't have a true understanding of the king but the fact is is that they're the friends of the prince and they're happy with the prince so this is the shift that the balsamta will take even further than this of the sanctity of the body of the celebration of the body not the denial the opposite of denying the flesh but transforming it by the realization that when you give it pleasure for something that the soul ultimately knows is related to a spiritual purpose it will take part in that pleasure alongside with us all so um foreign now this takes us a little further down the road I'll tell you another story same idea this time it'll be the wife of the belshanto will be the featured person who recognizes this it was on simplestora Cinema were in the home of the balcanto when they were drinking and singing and the balsamtov his wife said you know there's not going to be enough wine left for kiddish and Abdullah required things in your mind we've been there before we've been there before yeah and the Balcones of condom have to openly since okay so tell them that there's there's no more want tell them and go down and tell them sorry you know the party's over no more alcohol so she goes down to tell them and when she goes down by dancing and she sees that above them dancing she sees like the angels are a circle of like angels and like fire and she realizes that their dancing is Heavenly but she goes and she brings them all the why this you know keeps the party going the point Atkins brings down this story is to show that even sometimes the use of alcohol and what he argues is that perhaps you have to say that at a certain point the joy for some people who are not in great intellectuals or great capitalists will be happening through physical Joy including but that'll take me to the next thing which is the idea and the thoughts of the balshamtov that there is no place where God isn't now there are a variety of kabbalistic thinkers and the Bible itself says in Old Mavado there's nothing right else there's nothing else outside of him but the reality is that the kabbalistic system particularly the Rihanna Kabbalah extensively talk about the separation between the various stages of the development of the olamos and the spherotes there's levels of consciousness in which Progressive removalsumen contractions concealments of the Divine Light happens one after another to the point that we are living in complete darkness and denial of divine existence in this physical world kind of just like flipped that over and said no it's all there it's perhaps there are garments but you could it's like you see you know that the Garment is God's garment and once you know that the Garment isn't even the Garment anymore once you know that it's just God playing hide and seek there is no real hit in this anymore just that knowledge so all of a sudden this might be the underlying kind of key concept here is this concept of the Divinity in everything and and everyone and everywhere God is there that becomes really The Source if that is the case then God can be in the evil thought God could be in the pleasures of the flesh the problem is if you took that like I told that to somebody when you know they're like well then I can eat shrimp that's exactly the point of what the velnigon heard to build a gun heard that I can eat trip take that idea all the way to his conclusion is there is nothing separate from God so there is no such thing as something that's not allowed that's not kosher then why can't the man live with his sister if it's all God's love well the balship would argue that what's allowed is allowed and what isn't allowed isn't allowed that we're still within the framework of Torah and mid-spouse that we say what you can derive pleasure from that will be worked out more strongly with teachings of the Magid and such teachers as the authority so explain why you still have law but there was a antinomian which means a idea a concept here that that seem to be devaluing the law even if it wasn't in reality it seemed dangerously close to saying you don't need to keep the law now where did that come out in reality in the prayer service now you guessed because you came late if you would have been here early you would have known that that is one of the key ways of understanding what the Golden Gun was against was he was afraid that this is just some extension because shop site's fee one of the things that they did one of their issues that they had is that they had things that were essentially turning to antinomian tendencies that The Village on feared that the belshemta when his followers were aligned with the look at the uh and at that time you had Jacob Frank who was influenced by shops at speed kind of considered a later incarnation who was wild with orgies saying that you can discover God in the Sparks that have fallen into the clean pot so again the fear was that the Val Shanta was some variation maybe a less crazed version of a Jacob Frank or a shop said speed that was the fear that was one of the that was definitely one part of the fear it was a mistake to think that but there was a reason based on the past to be at least suspicious of that being the case I'll tell you one of the areas in which edcus makes a point that I don't agree with which is Edgars then goes on to talk about the power of Prayer and the belshanto's methodology for prayer was that he would enter into the prayer the the perhaps the most famous teaching the belshanto is teaching in partial snow in fact if you look at the one of the best ways I I feel to study the teachings of them is through this two volume work called balchemtov a la Torah or just Bal chantos on the Torah which is on the weekly Torah reading and the biggest selection of any Parsha is an impartius Noah and the whole section is called is the section on prayer the particular selection has to do with the idea that God tells Noah go enter into the ark and make the ark a second third bottom second and third floor make a light or a a special stone on top of the table right these ideas are reinterpreted by the balshamtov the Teva in Hebrew actually means also word Teva means arkan means word you should enter into the ark is re-read by The balshanda Who does a lot of this kind of re-reading as enter into the word of prayer as if it were something you can actually go into and you'll you're going to enter into it in the early stages the first story bottom four he says that there are three stages of kind of losing yourself to a spiritual reality that you can enter during the course of entering into the word during the course of Prayer so the first is on the mode like souls and like the spiritual worlds and then the shamot saw the world of the souls and then a locut and then Divinity now the truth is it's a play on allurionic teaching this is like one of the examples when you're really like who's the malshadavi just quoting he's just taking other people's ideas but actually in epicus points this out it's kind of not the luriana construct of FILA luriatic way of davening is the way of kavanot some type of theory in which each word has a husband has a numeric value called gamatria of coming up with some particular aspect Spira Divine name that has a particular influence that relates to the other words so you're combining words and letters to create this kind of I don't want to call manipulation but this this Divine flow based on these comments these intentions that you are fixing the worlds through these combinations but to the balchemtov it was rather than a kind of a a very mindful meditated concentrated focus on what it is that you were doing you were just entering into the prayer with ultimately the goal even though the goal had to happen as a gift from above so the speaking may not be able to induce it is that you would eventually lose something that does describe this where you start losing more more and more of your sensory perception of what's going on to the point where you stop even hearing what you're saying you're no longer in the in the realm of words the words have become the the purity of the cell until you eventually stop even existing and that's when you get to the place of what we call a liquid Divinity you don't even exist there you've merged so the balcantov has all of these teachings which are like boom like you are no longer just like climbing this ladder which he does to have a little bit of you're just merging you have lost your identity you have merged into God at that point that's all for tonight