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Introduction to the Writings of the Last Generation
“There is an allegory about friends who were lost in the desert, hungry and thirsty. One of them had found a settlement filled abundantly with every delight. He remembered his poor brothers, but he had already drawn far off from them and did not know their whereabouts. What did he do? He began to shout out loud and blow the horn, perhaps his poor, hungry friends would hear his voice, approach him, and come to that settlement that is filled with every delight.
So is the matter before us: We have been lost in the terrible desert along with all of humanity, and now we have found a great, abundant treasure, namely the books of Kabbalah in the treasure. They satisfy our yearning souls and fill us abundantly with lushness and contentment; we are satiated and there is more.
Yet, we remember our friends, who were left hopeless in the terrible desert. There is a great distance between us, and words cannot bridge it. For this reason, we have set up this horn to blow out loud so that our brothers might hear and draw near and be as happy as we are.
Know, our brothers, our flesh, that the essence of the wisdom of Kabbalah is the knowledge of how the world came down from its elevated, heavenly place, until it reached our ignoble state. This reality was necessary, as “the end of an act is in the preliminary thought,” and His thought acts instantaneously, for He needs no tools to work with as we do.
Thus, we were emanated in Ein Sof [infinity] in utter perfection from the start, and from there we came to this world.
It is therefore very easy to find all the future corrections, which are destined to come, from the perfect worlds that preceded us. Through it we know how to correct our ways henceforth, like man’s advantage over the beast, for the spirit of the beast descends, meaning sees only from itself onward, without the intellect or wisdom to look into the past so as to correct the future.
Man’s advantage over it is that the spirit of man ascends into the past, and looks into the past as one looks in the mirror and sees one’s flaws so as to correct them. Similarly, the mind sees what it went through and corrects its future conducts.
Thus, beasts do not evolve; they are still in the same state in which they were created, for they do not have, as man does, the mirror by which to see how to correct things and gradually evolve. Man develops day by day until his merit is secured and sensed, and he will ride on the high planets.
But all this refers to the natures outside of us, the nature of our surrounding reality, our food and mundane affairs. For this, the natural mind is quite sufficient.
However, internally, in ourselves, although we do evolve a little, we evolve and improve by being pushed from behind through suffering and bloodshed, since we have no tactic by which to obtain a mirror to see inside the people who lived in past generations.
It is even more so regarding the interior of the souls and the worlds, and how they came down to such dreadful ruin as today’s, where we have no security in our lives. In the coming years, we will be subject to all sorts of slaughter and death, and all admit that they have no counsel to prevent it.
Imagine, for example, that some historic book were to be found today, depicting the last generations ten thousand years from now. As we feel, the lesson from the suffering and torment will certainly be enough to reform them in good orders.
And these people have before them good orders, sufficient to provide security and complacency, and at the very least, to guarantee their daily lives in peace and quiet.
There is no doubt that if some sage would offer us this book about the wisdom of statesmanship and personal conduct, our leaders would seek out every counsel to arrange life accordingly, and there would be “no outcry in our broad places.” Corruption and the terrible suffering would cease, and everything would come peacefully to its place.
Now, distinguished readers, this book lays here before you in a closet. It states explicitly all the wisdom of statesmanship and the conducts of private and public life that will exist at the end of days, meaning the books of Kabbalah [in the manuscript, next to the text beginning here, it was written, “They are the perfection preceding the imperfection”].
In it, the corrected worlds that emerged with the perfection are set, as it says, perfection emerges first from the Creator, then we correct it and come to the perfection that exists in the upper world, emerging from Ein Sof, as in “the end of an act is in the preliminary thought.” Because the incomplete extends gradually from the complete, and there is no absence in the spiritual, they all remain existing and depicted in their complete perfection, in particular and in general, in the wisdom of Kabbalah.
Open these books and you will find all the good orders that will appear and the end of days, and you will find within them the good lesson by which to arrange mundane matters today as well, for we can learn from the past and by this correct the future.“