Chapter Ten: The Complete and Incomplete Righteous Person—Transforming Evil Through Love

Explore the nature of a righteous person, defined as one who vanquishes their animal soul and transforms its evil into good. The sources outline two primary categories: the "complete righteous person", also known as the "righteous person who knows only good", who has entirely transformed the evil of their animal soul to good, and the "incomplete righteous person", or "righteous person who knows evil", who retains some vestige of evil. These distinctions are rooted in the degree of the righteous person's love of G-d—complete and perfect love for the complete righteous person, and imperfect love for the incomplete. The complete righteous person's great love, specifically a "love of delights", fuels an utter hatred for the spiritual forces opposing holiness and repugnance for physical pleasures not used for serving G-d, allowing them to completely remove evil's "filthy garments" and convert its energy to good. In contrast, the incomplete righteous person's imperfect love means they lack absolute hatred or repugnance for evil, retaining a trace of evil that is subjugated and nullified by the good but not truly converted. This remaining evil finds no outward expression, not even in desires, and the person may even imagine it is completely gone, but its presence indicates the evil has not departed completely and therefore has not been converted to good. Complete righteous people are rare and are called "men of ascent" because they convert evil to holiness and their service is altruistic, aimed at uniting G-d and His presence below, drawing down benevolence through their actions, which are described using the mystical terms "ascent of feminine waters" causing a "descent of masculine waters". The category of incomplete righteous people encompasses many levels based on the remaining evil, varying qualitatively by the type of evil element and quantitatively by the degree to which it is nullified within the good, such as in proportions of 60:1 or 1000:1. Many righteous people found in all generations belong to this incomplete category. Chapters (00:00:00) - The Battle for the Righteous Individuals(00:02:21) - The Proximal and Imperfecteous Individuals(00:06:15) - The Problem of the Imperfect Judaeo-(00:11:14) - The Perfecteous Person(00:15:23) - The Perfecteous vs The Imperfect(00:17:30) - The Life of Men of Ascent(00:21:37) - The Complete Righteous Man(00:22:32) - The Life of the Men of Ascension