So many people are asking what to do about this plague of Corona, that is spreading in the world and how exactly do we stop it from spreading.
The whole world is in a panic and there are many institutes researching for vaccines finding many different possibilities.
There is an answer brought down in the Zohar by Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai
In Zohar Vayakhel Rebbi Shimon Says that Pitum Haketoret is a spiritual medicine for plagues. Specifically, why is that? So to understand better the reason for that we have to go back to before the time of Rabbi Shimon and further.
Pitum HaKetoret is a prayer that we say in the morning and in the afternoon.
There is an ancient Midrash that explains that when Moshe went up to Mount Sinai to receive the Torah, all the angels gave him presents including the angel of death, What was the present that the Angel of Death gave Moshe it was the secret of the ketoret he told him that the act of ketoret that in the time of Moshe was not only a prayer, but also a whole ceremony of burning incense has the possibility to remove death.
After Moshe came down from Mt. Sinai unfortunately, there was the sin of the Golden Calf and there was a plague and Moshe told Aaron to take the incense and run into the camp of Am Israel and stand between the people that are dying from the plague and the people that are still alive. Aaron, ran into the camp and was standing between those two camps of people that were infected and the people there were healthy and the plague stopped. Ketoret has this power and we might think that this only
applies to the act of the Ketoret that was done by Aaron in the Beit Hamikdash.
The burning of that insence, all was what was removing death. Rabbi Shimon in the Zohar tells us that also the prayer of the Ketoret and has this quality.
When we’re making the prayers, they’re made instead of the offerings and one corresponds to the other.
So when we are saying the prayer of the Tamid offering, which is a daily sacrifice in Beit Hamikdash it’s like we are sacrificing the Tamid offering in the Beit Hamikdash.
So the same thing when we are saying over the words of the prayer of the ketoret, it gives us the same quality as if we were burning of the incense in the halachic manner.
So this is the first simple understanding of it. Now the Zohar goes deeper and explains that it’s not only death that is prevented by the Pitum Ketoret It’s basically anything that is negative. All of the negative things in the world, they’re getting their sustenance from a certain source, which is the part within the spiritual system that God created.
That is the negative part of that system. So from that negative spiritual source, derive all the different applications of things such as plagues and people.
All those different negative things come from that one source.
Now, what is the source of the power of that negative side of the creation, So it ties into Kabbalah and the writings of Ari who explains that all of that is coming from sparks of holiness that are captured within that negative side of creation. From those sparks of holiness, the negative side gets its nourishment and then it’s able to manifest within the physical world in all those different ways.
Now we can understand why when we saying ketoret it helps to prevent All of those different negative things, because through Ketoret we are pulling out those sparks from the negative side.
So when the negative side doesn’t have those sparks, the power of the negative side goes down and then all of the manifestations, plagues and whatever it is, removed because of that because the negative side doesn’t have so much power.
As much as we will have more people around the world saying the Pitum ketoret, we are pulling more sparks from the negative side, connecting them to the system of Kedushah and then the negative side loses its power and all of the different manifestations of it.
If it’s the current plague, if it is people that are poor, if it is people that are suffering emotionally, physically, spiritually, all different kinds of different things, people that have fears and whatever, all those different things, it’s all coming from that one source. As much as we will perform Ketoret there will be less suffering in the world, less death in the world, less evil, in the world.
Now, obviously, like everything, there are many levels that this principle can be applied to. So people that are not involved in Kabbalah can just say over the words and it can be very significant. That’s a basic level.