| Kabbalah
and Education A Kabbalistic Approach to Spiritual Growth |
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| Kabbalah and Jewish Meditation |
Part
43 Communication is the most essential tool of an educator's trade. Expertise in this area will enable him to serve his students most effectively. When he can make himself felt and understood, he can bring them into ever deepening levels of understanding, thus fostering their growth and learning. It
follows therefore that this prerequisite of learning to communicate with
utmost sensitivity to the needs, interests, and abilities of the student,
while remaining totally faithful to the material itself, is a function of
the sefirah of binah ("understanding"). We see the
relationship between the sefirah of binah and the prerequisite
of effective communication as follows: Binah
comes from the root b-n, which can also spell bein meaning
"between," implying discernment between two things. Effective
communication requires clear perceptions of the listener's verbal and
non-verbal signals, as well as a very rigorous and particularized knowledge
of the material itself. All this must be combined with the further
discernment of how to match the two together. The
skill of effective communication requires the teacher to guard himself from
impatience and keep himself from lapsing into a harsh style of teaching,
which brings immediate and dramatic results, but which leaves no lasting
positive impression on the student's soul. This ability to guard oneself
from harmful expression is also a quality of binah, for it is the sefirah
which guards good and negates all which opposes Godliness. Kabbalah calls
this ability to guard (shamor) the feminine
[see footnote #1 below] polarity of
form‑building and discerning between holy and profane. It corresponds
with binah. [see footnote #2 below]
Severity
in its negative form derives from the external and "backside"
dimension of binah. In other words, binah is the root of
severity, but this is only its superficial and impure expression. The "frontside"
and innermost expression of binah is the teacher's ability to sweeten
all harshness with an overpowering and loving desire to care for the
student's ultimate good. The teacher must constantly challenge himself to
sweeten his judgment, to transform his emotional or intellectual tendencies
from harsh impatience to gentle loving-kindness, by correcting his binah,
i.e. his assessment of the situation.
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