The Kabbalistic New Year

Tired of always breaking those New Year’s resolutions? Kabbalah explains how to create true and lasting change

At the beginning of every year most of us are making resolutions to improve ourselves and our world. But somehow, in spite of our good intentions, most of our resolutions either are quickly forgotten or yield only short term change.

In Kabbalah, the New Year can occur at any time of the year. The New Year is a sign of lasting change within us that brings us a sense of joy, peace, and enduring fulfillment.

We can find through the wisdom of Kabbalah a guide, an instruction manual, intended expressly to show us this path to reaching complete joy and fulfillment. This path begins with a desire to search for meaning in our lives; it is the beginning of the spiritual journey.

Preparations

The journey along the path to spirituality develops our perception of reality. It is when we learn something new about our very essence. So, let us start with a few fundamentals that every traveler should know:

1. The Wisdom of Kabbalah speaks to every person who feels a need to find new meaning in his or her life, no matter their religion, race, gender, or age. It's about discovering a new world that operates according to clear rules that are beyond time and space.

2. Our five senses are not enough to navigate the spiritual world. Therefore, Kabbalah enables us to develop a sixth sense through which we can feel the whole of reality. Kabbalists are those who have already developed this "sixth sense," and from their experience of the spiritual reality, they chose to call it "the world of roots" or “the world of causes.”

3. Kabbalists wrote about the results of their research in a picturesque, symbolic language, "the language of branches." Similar to scientists who summarize their conclusions in formulas, the Kabbalists described and documented their discoveries in special words and names. These words and names were taken from the same terminology that we are familiar with. As it happens, they are usually connected to the yearly cycle, the months, seasons, and nature.

4. In the spiritual world, time has a different meaning than the one we know in our world. "Spiritual time” means a series of changing conditions or states. In other words, when a person changes, we can say that a certain amount of time has passed. Therefore, people who research the spiritual world go through different stages in their spiritual evolvement, meaning the holidays, with no connection to the calendar that we are familiar with. When we discuss the spiritual yearly calendar, the New Year can take place at any given corporeal moment. The spiritual reality has definite, strict rules, and it is free of any imagination or personal theories. Every Kabbalist discovers through his personal research the same discoveries made by the Kabbalists before him.

Now that we have some of the basics, we can embark on the journey.

The Spiritual New Year

The Kabbalists who ascend to the top of the spiritual pyramid describe a reality in which we are all united and act harmoniously like the cells in a body. This state is referred to as the “common soul," and it signifies the feeling that the collection of all our souls is united into one soul.

At some stage that common soul broke and split into many individual souls, which lost the sense of connection with each other. Over many generations, the Kabbalists spoke of the moment when a faint memory would awaken within each of the souls, a memory of that true state where they were connected to all the other souls. This is the moment when that inner drive awakens within us to set out and search for meaning in our lives.

This drive is also called "the point in the heart." The awakening of the point in the heart is usually characterized by a feeling of restlessness and dissatisfaction, which pushes a person to search until he or she finds the answer. This feeling can be compared to the feeling of someone who lost his memory but still has a faint recollection of the past, which doesn't let him rest until he discovers what it is.

This time of searching and inner spiritual transformation is referred to as a new beginning, or the "Kabbalistic New Year."

For those whose point in the heart has already awakened, the Kabbalists recommend developing and nurturing it. That way, with every step you take, another piece of the great puzzle that is our life will be revealed. When all the pieces of the puzzle are put together, a new “picture” of reality is revealed where you see how all the souls are united in a mutual connection by bonds of eternal, unconditional love. The beginning of this change is the beginning of the “New Spiritual Year."