"For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil."

The term "The Great Work" is not a term to be found in the literature of traditional Kabbalah, but it is a term which has come to be associated with traditional Kabbalistic ideas. Two key ideas underpinning the Great Work are:
 

   1. The universe we live in is not as it should be. In some way it is "damaged", and only a conscious and deliberate effort on the part of the created will restore it to its intended state. Also, as a consequence...

   2. We live in ignorance of our true estate. We know not what we are. In the words of the poet W. B. Yeats, "Consume my heart away; sick with desire and fastened to a dying animal, It knows not what it is..."
 

The Great Work is the attempt to undo the damage, and it consists of two parts. The first part is the preservation [teaching] of knowledge and techniques which enable individual human beings to awaken and recover the knowledge of their true nature. The second part is the deliberate efforts undertaken by these awakened individuals to restore the world to what it should have been. There is nothing explicitly Kabbalistic about this idea of the Great Work - similar ideas have occurred at many times and places - but the idea that the creation is not what it should have been is one of the key elements of Kabbalistic speculation, and the belief that it is possible for individual human beings to help to repair the damage and to restore the creation was and is one of the key motives underlying Kabbalistic practice.
 

The extent of Kabbalistic speculation has been so extensive that it is difficult to extract simple explanations for why human beings do not understand their true nature, or why the creation is flawed. It is unreasonable to expect simple explanations for something which lies outside the domain of intellectual speculation, and perhaps it is unreasonable to expect an  explanation of any kind, agreeing with Wittgenstein that "the sense of the world must lie outside the world"; those who go beyond the world cannot be expected to bring back answers which mean anything to those who are in it. Given this caveat, the following discussion on the Great Work is based on several traditional ideas, but the synthesis is mine. Those who wish to delve into centuries of speculation within a strictly Judaic tradition are referred to Scholem.
 

A great deal of Kabbalistic speculation begins with the Biblical story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. This story is not to be taken literally; it is usually taken as an allegory to be interpreted within the context of general Kabbalistic ideas concerning the Creation. The Garden represents the Creation as it should be, the Creation as it was before the Fall. Before the Fall, Adam and Eve were conscious, but not self-conscious - they did not know that they were naked. The sin of Adam and Eve was to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and in doing so they became self-conscious; they understood what they had done, became afraid, and hid themselves from God. As a consequence God made coats of skin to clothe them and they were ejected from the Garden to become human beings - animals who join sexually to produce offspring, animals who die. The return to Eden and the Tree of Life was barred.
 

the Biblical story mentions two trees in the garden: the Tree of Life, and the Tree of  Knowledge of Good and Evil. For some Kabbalists the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge were one tree [!] until Adam and Eve picked the fruit, causing the two to separate; the Tree of Life became the right pillar of the sephirothic Tree, and the Tree of Knowledge became the left, and the Tree of Life as we now see it is not the original Tree as it was before the fruit was picked. The sin of Adam was the sin of separation, the sin of creating a division between knowledge and life.
 

The Biblical story can also be interpreted as a story of the growth of self consciousness.  There was a time when humans lived unselfconsciously among the animals, a time when humans *were* animals, and that state was shattered by the growth of self-consciousness. The self-conscious creature, terrified by the naked consciousness of the One, and in danger of slipping back into the One, hid itself away from God; the Cherubim who wielded fiery swords were servants of its own making. The self-conscious creature, in an attempt to strengthen its fragile identity, anchored itself to the left side of the Tree, the Tree of Knowledge, and set about building the structures and abstractions which have resulted in our complex and confused society.
 

There is a relative unanimity among Kabbalists that the left side of the Tree is the source of evil. To be fair, it is also the source of good as it is difficult to have one without the other, but the problem of evil was the major preoccupation. Suppose a rich man walks past a beggar in the street. The rich man thinks: "If I give to this person, then logically I ought to give to all equally poor people, for all are equally miserable and equally deserving. I do not have enough money to feed every poor person, and my poverty will not solve the problem of poverty, so really there is no point in giving." This kind of rational thinking belongs on
the left side of the Tree. Suppose the wealthy man decides to give something. How much should he give? Everything he has?
 

This is unlikely. He will give a little and hold back the rest. This "holding back" is the quality of Din, Judgement, In the Bahir the left side of the Tree was associated with gold, and the right side with silver. each one of us has inherited the ability to hold back. [GOD, on the other hand, gives lavishly:  of love, of mercy, of gentleness, of blessing, of provision, of compassion, of faithfulness, of patience, of long-suffering.  "Give, and it shall be given unto you"; "take all that you have and give it to the poor".  Who is "the poor"?  The Spirit knows.  How is it done?  The Spirit knows ],
 

Let us continue with the story of the rich man and the beggar. Why does the beggar have so little? The beggar has so little because there are laws of property. Laws belong on the left side (Hod). The beggar cannot take what is not his because there are authorities to uphold the law, and they also belong on the left side (Gevurah). There are well-defined procedures for
transferring property; work is one of these. These well defined procedures also belong on the left side (Gevurah, Hod). If the beggar does not "fit in", then he must take what comes by chance, or live outside the law.
 

In every case we see what we would regard as an inequitable situation as being created and sustained by qualities associated with the left side of the Tree. Fortunately there are also laws (left side) which provide some minimal provisions for the poor, which is evidence that good is not completely divorced from evil. How did these laws come about? I believe that in most people the left and right pillars are not completely divorced; they meet on the middle pillar to produce Rachamim, compassion.
 

In the previous example, evil was a side effect of structure; when one puts a fly in a jar and seals the lid, then sooner or later the fly will suffocate. The effect of confining the fly is that the fly dies. There is no evil in the jar, and if evil is to be found anywhere it is in the hand that screws the lid tight, or in the mind that conceives of ways of killing. In the same way, the left side of the Tree provides the structure for evil, it is not in itself evil. Structure provides the means for people such as you and me to create evil, but there is no suggestion that some kind of metaphysical evil is involved.
 

The suggestion that powers of evil exist is usually based on the belief that the Creation involved or even required an excess of the quality of Din or Judgement. In the Zohar the first attempts at creation were unbalanced, and the power of Din overflowed and shattered the worlds; the fragments fell into the Abyss to become the realm of the Qlippoth, powers which are the result of unbalanced Din, and hence evil in the sense that unbalanced Judgement and Severity are evil.
 

Other Kabbalists have stressed that, regardless of the catastrophic origin of evil, its continued existence is based on an unbalanced flow of energy down the left side of the Tree, and it is this steady drip of unbalanced force which nourishes the Sitra Achara, or Other Side. It is human evil which creates this unbalance. In a definition reminiscent of the classic definition of dirt,
 

Gikatilla defined evil as an entity which was not in its rightful place - sand is fine on a beach, but not in engine oil - and there are powers which have a rightful place in the world but which are evil in the wrong context. Kabbalistic views of evil cover the entire spectrum, from the surprisingly sophisticated view of evil as a structural and necessary part of creation, to a low superstitious belief in a hierarchy of evil demons.
 

The exact nature of the Great Work is no simpler to explain than the problem of evil itself, and if one takes it to be the attempt to restore a defect in the creation, then its nature will depend on what one believes that defect to be. There is no simple view of the Great Work, but there are a number of clear threads to follow.
 

The first thread is to re-unite what has become separate, and the place to begin is in one's own nature. When one re- unites the elements of one's being, then one becomes capable of transmitting, of acting as an agent between the higher and the lower. This is an important Kabbalistic idea. The purpose of Kabbalah is not a personal quest for self-realisation; it is a conscious decision to play a part in uniting the higher and the lower, not only in oneself, but more importantly still, in the world.
 

If it is part of the essential nature of God to give, then someone who only receives and does not give cannot be like God or understand the nature of God. To know God one must not only receive, but give out in direct measure. Likewise, if "God wished to know God", then one must fulfill the purpose of creation by making this possible. There is a tradition that Kether and Malkuth play a complementary role in sustaining the Tree of Life. As long as Malkuth only takes from Kether, and does not give back, it is not like God. Once Malkuth begins to give back to Kether, a continuous loop of impulse and reflection will be created, it will become like God, And "God will know God". It is our role, as creatures of matter, to create this bridge and make the creation self-conscious.
 

In Jewish Kabbalah, this process is called "tikkun" or reintegration, and is best known from complex speculations of Isaac Luria. Scholem states:

     "The object of this human activity, which is designed to complete the world of tikkun, is the restoration of the world of Asiyyah to its spiritual place, its complete separation from the world of the kelippot, and the achievement of a permanent, blissful state of communion between every creature and God which the kelippot will be unable to disrupt or prevent."
 

Unfortunately, one cannot repair the design faults in a machine by giving it a fresh coat of paint. The Tree of Knowledge is not going to be reunited with the Tree of Life unless it is re-united in ourselves, and when one looks at conditions in the world today, one sees an ever accelerating dive into the knowledge of Asiyyah and a blissful disregard for the condition of the human soul.
 

For one person to supply to another person a reason for living is the antithesis of the Great Work, which is to understand it for oneself. If each of us is a little piece of God, and "God wishes to know God", then the whole is to be found in the sum of the parts, and each part has its own role to play. No one has the authority to define the Great Work for another. ["Judge not and ye shall not be judged." Judge only "righteously":  through the holy Spirit only .]