A question I received: It is written, “What’s important is not your reward, but who you are working for.” How can I be thinking about this, instead of the reward?

My Answer: These words may confuse you. Who am I working for? For myself, and no one else! It’s forbidden to imagine the Creator as any image or form. The Creator is the quality of bestowal which we have to reveal within us. Therefore, the answer to the question, “Who am I working for?” depends on who I identify myself with.

If I identify myself with my egoistic desire, then I will think that I am working for the Creator. Alternatively, I can identify myself with the point in the heart, which is the quality of bestowal – the embryo of the soul. This will mean that I want to attain the quality of bestowal, called the Creator; I want it to manifest inside me.

By definition, the Creator is Boreh, from the words Bo – come, and Reh – see. This means that you have to discover this quality inside you. So, there is no one outside of me that I’m working for. I am working on my own correction in order to attain bestowal and love, which are called “the Creator.”

On the other hand, if I will imagine that the Creator is somewhere outside of me and I have to work for Him, to carry out His desires, then I will not be interpreting the Kabbalistic texts correctly. This is exactly how the religion of Judaism came to be, when the people lost their inner sensation of the Creator during the fall of the Second Temple. Later on, Christianity and Islam also originated from Judaism. These religions depict the Creator outside of a person, separate from him, instead of inside him.

During the period of the Second Temple, the Creator disappeared from man’s sensations and became concealed from him. Thus, people lost the correct picture of the world, because they started thinking that the Creator is someone that exists separately from them, that He isn’t a quality that becomes revealed inside them. They started believing that they have a Master they have to work for, like slaves. All the religions are founded on this false interpretation of the Creator’s essence.

Instead of thinking of the Creator as the main, most important quality of creation, which becomes expressed inside a person, people started thinking of Him as an external individual that sits somewhere up in the clouds and pulls the levers controlling our lives. This is why it’s so important to learn the correct Kabbalistic definitions, as otherwise it’s very easy to make mistakes and bring everything down to regular religion.

In Kabbalah, the rules are explained very simply: There is no Light without a Kli; there is no Creator without creation, Boreh = Bo + Reh, and so on.
(From the Preparation to the Daily Kabbalah Lesson)

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