'Not Understanding' as a Tool

QUESTION: I don't have problems with irritation as much as I do with ‘I don't understand’. When you read in Aramaic, I don't understand. When you read in Hebrew, I don't understand. When you speak in English, a lot of times I don't understand. And I know that others feel this way, I know that it's normal, but right now I'm needing to hear from you, your answer about the gap, and that gap is being the place of the work. I'm needing to hear that answer again, in a language around the lack of understanding.

RABBAH: So, there is a classic, beautiful and generous answer of Ba’al Hasulam to that question. Definitely Ba’al Hasulam understands that when we read Ha’Ari, or we start to read Zohar, which is so layered and concealed and needs so much preparation, the first thing we will meet is not understanding. 

Ba’al Hasulam is saying that there is a law, or what I call ‘a term of engagement’, that if a person perseveres in not understanding, willing to be in that state and yet still holds in himself the wish to understand, he is drawing the light that belongs to his spirit into him. 

Not understanding, even in English, means that you stand under something. Under Standing. 
In Hebrew it goes straight to the core, which is LEHAVIN, to understand. LEHAVIN means that your heart can actually express the quality of BINAH. It means that we need to stand under BINAH in order to understand. 

The question is where to stand, so that you will be under? 

Because when you say 'I want to understand', you stand under MALCHUT, under the will to receive to oneself. 

When you say 'though I do not understand, I wish to understand' meaning, I wish to stand under something else, that can actually carve in me a vessel of understanding. This is the gap. So, first you say that even in English sometimes you don't understand. Even in Hebrew they sometimes don't understand. Not to mention Aramaic. I actually maintain that the Zohar did not do it accidentally, there's nothing that happens by accident in the way the Zohar is constructed. With Aramaic, it was actually to create the difference between Rear and Front. Aramaic usually performs. One can say, that which is the colloquial language of the time, which everyone speaks. And then the Hebrew is what gives it the face, and then you have the gap. This is how it's built.

Ha’Ari is using a different gap. It's the gap of the term ‘language of Kabbalah’, which creates a different gap from Hebrew. So when someone reads Ha’Ari and starts to understand it, he actually can see that he does not understand the root of the Hebrew, he understands Hebrew in the way he speaks it. So, not understanding is a tool. 

Actually saying: ‘yes, I do not understand, I'm not able to understand it’ is a calling. I'm asking to understand, but not on my terms but rather in the gap between what it wishes to tell me and what I wish to know. So we have a triangle. There is another point in this which is, how the Right, or the proper, adequate Will is being created? It's not a given state. It's when we come to say that we need to understand, that we want to understand, not because we want to control it, but we want to understand so we can fulfill our duty. So, what the light is doing is actually not giving us the understanding. It's carving in us a tool, a need, that is built in a more adequate position to the light. So that the first extension of the light to us is always being uncomfortable in perception, in feeling, towards everything in Ourself.