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 place. What did he do? He began to shout out loud and blow the horn; perhaps his poor hungry friends would hear his voice, approach and come to that abundant settlement filled with every delight.
So is the matter before us: we have been lost in a terrible desert along with all mankind, and now we have found a great, abundant treasure, namely the books of Kabbalah in the treasure. They fulfill our yearning souls and fill us abundantly with lushness and agreement; we are satiated and there is more.
Yet the memory of our friends left hopelessly in the terrible desert remains deep within our hearts. The distance is great, and words cannot bridge between it. For that reason, we have set up this horn to blow loudly so that our brothers may hear and draw near and be as happy as we.
Know, our brothers, – our flesh – that the essence of the wisdom of Kabbalah consists in the knowledge of how the world came down from its elevated, heavenly place, to our ignoble state. This reality was necessitated, as “the end of a matter is in the first thought,” and His thought acts instantly, for He needs no practical tools as we do. Thus, we were emanated in the Infinite in utter perfection from the start, and came to this world (meaning: in the thought of the Creator to do good to His creatures).
It is therefore very easy to find all the future corrections destined to come from the perfect worlds that preceded us within the wisdom of Kabbalah. Through it we know how to correct our ways from here on. Man’s merit over beast is that the spirit of the beast descends, which means it only sees from it onwards, without the intellect and wisdom to retrospect so as to correct the future.
Man’s merit over beasts, is that the spirit of man ascends into the past. Man retrospects as one looks in the mirror and sees one’s flaws so as to correct them. Similarly, the mind sees what has passed and corrects its future conduct.
Thus, beasts do not evolve; they are still, in the same state they were created in, 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. But all this refers to the natural and superficial ways, meaning the nature of our surrounding reality, our food and mundane affairs. For this, the natural mind is quite sufficient.
However, internally, in our selves, although we do evolve some, we evolve and improve by being pushed from behind through suffering and bloodshed. It is so because we have no artifice by which to obtain a mirror to see inside man, which they had in past generations.
It is even more so regarding the interior of the souls and the worlds, and how they came to such dreadful ruin as today’s; so great is the destruction that we have no safety in our lives. We will be subject to all sorts of slaughter and death in the near future, and everyone admits that they have no counsel to prevent it.
Imagine, for example, that some historic book were to be found today that depicts the last generations ten thousand years from now for you, describing the comport of both individuals and society. Our leaders would seek out every counsel to arrange life here accordingly, and we would come to “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 lies here before you in a closet. It states explicitly all the wisdom of statesmanship and the behavior of private and public life that will exist at the end of days. It is the book of Kabbalah, where the corrected worlds are set. They emerged perfect, as it says, perfection emerges first from the Creator, then we correct it and come to complete and lasting perfection in the Upper World.
It stems from the Creator as “the end of a matter is in the first thought.” Because the incomplete stretches gradually from the complete, not instantaneously, and since there is no absence in the spiritual, they all remain existing and depicted in their perfect form and image, in particular and in general, in the wisdom of Kabbalah.
Open these books and you will find all the good comportment 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. We can examine history and by that correct the future.
I have seen all of that, and I can no longer restrain myself. I have resolved to disclose the conducts of correction of our definite future that I have found by observation and by reading in these books. I have decided to go out to the people of the world with this horn, and I believe and estimate that it shall suffice to gather all those deserving to begin to study and delve in the books. Thus they will sentence themselves and the entire world to a scale of merit.
