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“When a person learns Torah, he must intend that the Torah and Mitzvot he is doing will help him emerge from the control of the evil.” – Kabbalist Baruch Ashlag (Rabash), “What Is ‘The Earth Feared and Was Still,’ in the Work.”
Learning Torah requires applying an intention to change our egoistic nature, which makes us want to enjoy ourselves at the expense of others, to its opposite.
By intending to turn ourselves into altruists who connect positively to each other, it means that we use what is called “the light”—the upper light, the upper energy, the light of the Torah, or the Torah itself—in order to correct ourselves, i.e., to change ourselves from egoists to altruists.
Learning Torah thus means constantly feeling what is happening to us at the level of our desires, thoughts and actions. It is learning not with the mind, but with the heart.
By learning Torah, we conduct inner work on the path to life’s goal, and we use the Torah as the force that corrects us, i.e., which inverts our nature from egoistic to altruistic. Thanks to such a force, we can then identify the evil within us—our egoistic nature—to the extent that it eventually ceases to exist.
After such a diagnosis, the Torah turns the evil in us into goodness and we then resemble the Creator, the absolute good force of love, bestowal and connection. We then become filled with love and bestowal toward others and through them to the Creator, the force of love and bestowal itself. We then discover what is called “the whole world is filled with His glory.” In other words, we reveal the Creator—the force of love, bestowal and connection—as existing in everyone and everything.