There is nothing man can do to force or manipulate God. If we would be able to do that, God would not be God. The Torah teaches us that sometimes because of prayer, repentance and other actions of man, God decides to stop something bad that was about to happen or to stop something bad that is happening.
If we are to believe that we have no choice and everything that will happen will happen, then the concept of free will that God tells us about in the Torah would be a lie and God doesn’t lie.
When you believe in God you understand that everything in the universe and beyond is from God. If you found that drinking a certain tea or taking a certain medicine helps you battle an illness, we don’t worship the tea or the medicine, we thank God for including it in his creation and giving man the wisdom to figure it out. We thank God that he healed us because all those things are nothing without God.
So if you are sick and you drank the tea that healed you, do you just override Gods will of you being sick?
What if you got sick and didn’t do anything and then after a few weeks your immune system fought the illness off, did your immune system get one over on Gods will of you being sick?
Here is what the Torah has to say on these topics.
- When something bad happens to a person it does not mean it happened because he sinned. Reference? The entire Book of Job / Iyov. People that always suggest that something bad that happens means the person sinned, contradict what God says on this topic and they should be ignored regardless who they are.
- When something bad happens it has a purpose. It is always good practice to take a good look at our behavior, repent and pray, however, it does not mean that what is happening is because of something we did wrong.
- What we think is bad might be good. When people suffer a small illness that makes them change a bad lifestyle habit is it bad or good? If their actions prevent them from a bigger disaster, the small illness was a good thing. If someone loses a job or a relationship, is it bad or good? If you are here you are someone that thinks and you already have one instance in your life that you know of that you thought was bad when it happened but now you can’t stop thanking God that the “bad” event did happen.
- Just like everything that happens has a reason for it, all of creation has a reason. This includes everything in creation that allows us to create cures. If God doesn’t want someone to be cured, they can take the same medicine that has been proven 100% effective and in their case it won’t work.
The Torah teaches us that even when God wants to do a miracle, he liked seeing man do an action to bring that miracle about. If you read the book of Exudos / Shemot, you will see this theme repeat itself over and over. Moses is told to use wave his hand or staff / stick prior to a miracle happening. We need to pay attention not just to those events but to the countless events that Moses used prayer alone to ask God to change his mind. Again, nobody forces God, however, we can appeal to God.
Kabbalah deals with the super natural, things we cannot always see. Think about a virus that the human eyes can’t see yet we know the damaging effects they can have. The medicine that we can see, can cure the unseen. The virus is part of Gods creation but so is the cure. Our sages teach us that the cure was created before the problem.
Kabbalah tries to address the evil forces that are always trying to hurt us. The very first story in the Torah is about an evil force, the snake (doesn’t matter what it means right now) hurting mankind. God did create the medicine before the problem, he did so by telling Adam clearly what not to do.
Kabbalah tries to give man some medicine and techniques to fight the evil forces. How goyish and new age would it sound if I told one such weapon could be music? Seriously, be honest, how new age does this sound? Or is it possible that this is clearly in the Torah without any drivel? It is worth you read the entire chapter of 1 Samuel 16 but here is just verse 23 “And whenever the tormenting / evil spirit from God troubled Saul, David would play the harp. Then Saul would feel better, and the tormenting / evil spirit would go away.”
We see clearly right in the Torah that at least when David played the hard, an evil spirit that WAS FROM GOD went away. However you must continue reading the story. When Saul became jealous and didn’t control himself, the music didn’t matter anymore. In other words, there is no magic trick that forces anything is we are evil. We must change something and use Torah based tools and traditions that never contradict Torah by even a hair, in order to help us live our best lives on a planet that seems to just have a lot more evil than good.
Worshipping anything other than God causes God to get angry (according to God, obviously according to the feel good hippy Rabbis of YouTube, God cannot get angry, he is all love all the time, at least for as long as they need more YouTube views and subscribers). In Kabbalah there are powerful weapons to destroy evil forces, real powerful, however it is too easy for the weak human brain to start worshipping those weapons. Furthermore, without personal change, those weapons only hurt the person. When a person reflects on the bad that has befallen them, you are acknowledging God, you understand that as much pain as you are in right now, the first thing is you must turn to God, reflect on your actions, see what you can fix, pray to God and if it so happens that you truly understand that the Kabbalistic weapons are just like medicine, they are tools from God, then if they are ones with true traditions, then and only then, can you try to amplify things using those methods.
Kabbalah meditation is only about self reflection and connecting to God. There is no worship of Gods creations, just of God. The meditative process in kabbalah does not have to include objects, papers with words on it, or anything else.
The above was a small intro to this topic. One of the main reasons the ideas in Kabbalah are rarely practiced, is because the evil force within the world tries to get people to focus on everything but the truth.