Question: How is it possible not to worry about our material lives, including work and family? What should we do if the bare necessities force us to pay more attention to this than the group? How can we focus all our attention only on the point of free choice?

Answer: We live in this world where a person has to get married, work, and be a full fledged citizen. We perceive the external conditions as lawful because this world was not created precisely in this way by accident, being detached from the process we have to go through. Everything descended from the spiritual world and surrounds us out of necessity.

All of the twists and turns that humanity undergoes as a whole and each person individually have to take place precisely in this way, no matter the form in which they are expressed. There are no accidents. That is why a person has to live a normal life and take care of all the necessities as is commonly accepted in his society.

What does “commonly accepted” mean? A person has to take care of the things that are vitally necessary and ensure a normal existence for himself. He has to have a family, a home, children, a pension fund, go on vacation, and so on. The morning hours have been allotted to us for studying Kabbalah, although we “steal” them from rest or sleep. In addition, we have to devote an hour or hour and a half to Kabbalah before going to sleep, provided that a person has the opportunity to do so.

That is how our world is built. By nature a man spends less time taking care of the household than a woman and that is why he has to make up for it by studying Kabbalah. That is what the Kabbalists of the past did as well. Rabash worked as a simple blue-collar worker, laying roads or doing construction work, yet he would get up two or three hours before everyone to study. In the evening after work, when everyone rested, he also sat and studied.

Therefore, we shouldn’t leave behind all of our material worries. It’s just that we have to give the appropriate meaning to everything. Some people scorn this life and want to fly up high above it like little angels, thinking, “The only thing I care about now is my soul.” Well, that is an incorrect approach because the “soul” is your desire for pleasure which has been corrected by the intention to bestow to your neighbor. But until then, you do not have a soul. This has to be clearly understood.

First discern your corrupted egoistic desire and try to correct at least a part of it. Then you will acquire a soul. This can only be done with the help of the environment as well as normal, commonly accepted participation in all the worries of regular life.

The science of Kabbalah talks about the correction of the world, the correction of all people because it has a very realistic attitude to every person and his life, and to human society as a whole—in a word, to everything. Kabbalah sees this world as a result of the spiritual world. It is precisely in the conditions we find here that we have to undergo the correction.

We do not shut ourselves off from life in the slightest, the way it is done in some other methods. Leaving the world, going off to a monastery, a cell, or sitting in a lotus position in a faraway mountain—none of this is in accord with our method because a person has to be involved in regular human life.
[36258]
From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 2/24/11, Writings of Rabash

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