Question: Why is having a group so important for the study of Kabbalah?

Answer: The role of the Kabbalistic group is similar to that of family, friends, relatives, social security, and medical insurance in our life. If I’m in a tough situation, fall ill, or lose my job, there is a system that helps me in that weak moment.

This system of mutual support in spiritual development is called "mutual guarantee" (Arvut). The speed and ease of our advancement toward the goal – the revelation of the Creator – depend upon the strength of this system. It influences everyone, and its strength accumulates as a result of our common efforts.

Rabash writes: “We have gathered here to establish a society for all who wish to climb the degrees of man (Adam), and not remain as a beast.” When we make a joint decision to follow the method of Baal HaSulam, rise above our egoism, and reveal the Creator in the connection between us, we are already making an agreement.

We have to help each other to value the greatness of the goal and the Creator, seeing all the friends as the greatest in the generation, inspiring them with the greatness of the spiritual goal, and realizing our own insignificance. I guarantee to the friends that I will help with this, regardless of what state I am in. These are conditions of our agreement.

Following this, there can be two states:
1. Either I support the group in inspiration, power, unity, and the greatness of the Creator,
2. Or as soon as I become weak, they begin caring for me.

It’s like two communicating vessels. The moment a drop of water is removed from one of them, the water immediately flows into it from the other one, and the water levels always even out in them. The width or volume of each vessel does not matter: If they are connected, the water level will be the same in both.

This is how we are connected in the group. They give me strength, and I give strength to them. It’s impossible to advance without such a mutual guarantee.
[21435]
From the Lesson on Rabash’s Article, 9/17/10

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Question: How was Rabash able to describe the states that a person goes through?

Answer: This is the path of every soul. It’s just that the soul of Rabash was granted the ability to write about this.

In the past, souls went through the same states and attained even higher levels. In the Torah, Moses described the entire path with all of its details, you just don’t see them.

Then Rabash came and brought the explanations to a lower level, expressing them in a language we understand – the language of feelings. Baal HaSulam also describes the same states, but using the language of Light and desire, two forces.

The human body reacts to different substances. One of them makes me excited, another calms me down, and yet another makes me feel happy. Here, too, we are talking about spiritual components that awaken you. First and foremost, it is feelings, which are then ordered, measured, and systematized according to the laws of interaction between the Lights and vessels.

Rabash writes about the things present in spiritual life, similar to how you would describe your breakfast: half a tomato, a quarter of a cucumber, bread, cheese, butter, coffee with sugar, and so on. When people hear about this, they feel the same thing you felt.

The difference is that the spiritual description is experienced much more deeply and in more detail: exactly what kind of cheese, what kind of milk was it produced from, what kind of cow did it come from, who made it, who sold it, what kind of knife was used to cut it, what kind of knife was used to spread it onto the bread, and so on. You understand all of this.

But most importantly, inside all of this, you reveal the importance of the Giver. All of these components help you to attain Him. This is the revelation of the Creator to creation.
[21596]

From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/20/10, “The Greatness of a Person Depends on His Faith in the Future”

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Question: What is constant faith?

Answer: Faith is a force which I receive from the Creator. It illuminates me, keeping me above my desires, my nature, like a magnet that holds a piece of metal in the air, against gravity.

There are two forces: the force of gravity (the will to receive pleasure) and the force of bestowal (the power of faith, a magnet) that draws a “piece of metal” up. These two forces oppose each other. If the force of faith that the Creator radiates to me holds me up, above my desire to feel pleasure, I am “righteous.” If the Creator lets me go, I immediately fall into egoism, and then I am “wicked.”

What does constant faith mean? I reach the state when my connection with the group supplies constant aspiration toward bestowal, as if I make a covenant with the group about our mutual support, and the Creator becomes a witness to this by promising to always illuminate us, holding us in bestowal above the will to receive (faith above reason).
[21409]
From the Lesson on Rabash’s Article, 9/17/10

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On the Day of Atonement we read the story of Jonah, the prophet whom the Creator had instructed to travel to Nineveh in order to awaken the people there to do good deeds. However, Jonah decided to run away from the Creator. He boarded a ship and decided to sail far, far away. But the Creator made the sea stormy, and when the sailors on the ship learned that Jonah was the cause of the storm, they threw him into the sea. A whale swallowed Jonah and brought him to shore, to the city of Nineveh.

Jonah went into the city and after he spoke to the people, they turned away from evil and attained love for one another. That is how Jonah carried out the Creator’s decree against his own will.

Jonah, boarding the ship, is a soul descending into a human body because a person in this world is like a ship in a stormy sea. A soul comes into a body in order to reach its correction by connecting with other souls. It is exactly through the egoistic desire to receive pleasure that it can correct itself by using egoism and the inclination to reject others specifically to connect with others and love them. That is how the soul develops from the “point of bestowal” to the Creator’s level and greatness.

This “point of bestowal” gradually connects greater egoistic desires to itself. The desires that are not yet able to be used for the sake of bestowal are left unused (restricted). This happens gradually, 125 times, until the point transfers all the desires to receive pleasure to itself.

The Creator sends the “point of bestowal,” the root of the soul (the prophet Jonah) into this world and into the desires of a person (the ship). The sailors and the captain are angels, meaning the Creator’s agents that surround man.

Jonah needs to awaken his desires for correction, connect with all the souls (the city of Nineveh), and awaken them to correction. He must turn their evil inclination into goodness and love for one another. Otherwise, they will fall into egoism and hatred, which will bring them to death.

In order to do this, we need to attract the help of the Light. This is what we mean by asking or screaming for help. Depending on how "loud" we scream, the Light elevates a part of our desire to receive pleasure and connects it to the action of bestowal.

In this way, we transfer all our desires from our world, from the desires “for our own sake,” to the world to come, the desires “for the sake of others.” By doing this we enter the Creator’s world where we perceive ourselves and the world through the quality of bestowal, experienced as eternal and perfect existence.

The story of the prophet Jonah speaks of how the Creator will force us, either through the good path or the path of suffering, to disseminate Kabbalah around the world, the method of the world’s correction. That is why it is written, "Therefore choose life," which is what the Day of Atonement is about.

[21382]
From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/17/2010, Selected Excerpts for Yom Kippur

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The force of faith is illumination that expands from Above and is regarded as the Creator’s testament, as it is written: “The Creator will testify that he will no longer revert to egoism.” What does the Creator testify by? He testifies by His property, the simple Light. However, by expanding to us through the system of the worlds, the simple Light forms into the illumination of three lines and shines to us precisely in the middle line.

This gives me an opportunity to realize my evil (through comparing good, the right line, with the evil, the left line), to perform the analysis of “true/false” over “bitter/sweet,” to ascend in bestowal above the will to receive (what is called faith above reason), and build myself in the middle line by following the example of the Light (the Creator’s property of the middle line, His testament) expanding onto me.

I see what the Creator models for me, receive forces from Him, and build myself in similarity to Him. But all of this is possible while the Creator illuminates me, and I will never have the power of faith on my own. This is what is called the Creator’s testament.
[21408]
From the Lesson on Rabash’s Article, 9/17/10

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Question: What motivates me to keep the covenant I made with the Creator?

Answer: Nothing does! Suppose I fell in love with a girl. A month later I don’t want her anymore. What should I do? People tell me, “You have to stay with her for life.” But why should I? It would be a lie, not the desire of my heart. If I hate her now, how will I be able to live all my life with her? How, then, do we commit to marriage? We realize that we won’t be able to live with the same feeling of infatuation forever and it will be a lie.

Marriage has an Upper Root: the union of the Creator and the created being, founded on attainment of the Higher Goal, not corporeal love. Love is defined as mutual support and assistance toward achieving this goal.

If I understand this principle, I can rise above my desire to receive pleasure and walk my path of life by way of bestowal. I don’t sign a promise saying that I will love bestowal all my life; this is impossible and therefore we can’t even talk about that. Rather, I sign the promise saying that I will always treat the Creator as Great, and I wish to attain Him by way of making a covenant with Him. That is why it is written: “Husband and wife, and the Creator between them.” Otherwise, there won’t be a marriage.

It is the Host who matters to me, not His table full of delicious treats that stands between us. The “treats” serve as the first contact between us, until I am able to build a higher connection with the Host in order to attain that higher connection. In other words, the covenant we make with the Host does not happen at the level of love between us, or because He provides “treats” for me, as in the case with a young man and a young woman who marry because of the animate love between them. On the contrary, we value each other because the connection between us allows us to reach the Upper Root, the exalted spiritual goal.

Now, a question arises: How can one remain focused on this exalted goal? That is why we need the group. It is the place where you have a guarantee, and it can give you the force of faith which will always serve as your “fuel.” You can’t achieve this on your own. Even the Creator won’t hold you up if you don’t make the effort.
[21431]
From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/17/10, “A Transgression Does Not Put Out A Mitzva”

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After studying in a Kabbalistic group for a number of years, a person arrives at a realization that in order to advance further, he needs a “foreign” force. It takes a person several years to reach the feeling that alone he is incapable of attaining the revelation of the spiritual world, the Creator. At the beginning one wants to advance through learning the knowledge of the wisdom of Kabbalah and therefore he strives to study more. Later he wants to advance by participating in dissemination, thinking that he will attain what he desires through force and power.

A person associates his spiritual advancement with everything else except acquiring the desire to bestow. Nevertheless, he goes through a process of spiritual development while studying in the group and the Light influences him, causing questions to arise: “What will happen to me? Will I ever acquire the quality of bestowal?” Gradually bestowal gains more importance in his eyes.

He gradually begins to feel that bestowal is very valuable and cannot be attained through anything in this world. He sees that those who have attained bestowal have something so precious that nothing can exceed its value. And all of these realizations result from the influence of the Light. Once a person feels this, he comes to agree with all of the group’s conditions so they will become his guarantors in acquiring the quality of bestowal. That is when a person is ready to form an alliance with them.
[21450]
From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/17/10, “A Transgression Does Not Put Out A Mitzva”

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Question: Rabash writes that the Creator “hears the prayer of every mouth.” But you say that the prayer has to be internal. So what prayer does He hear?

Answer: A prayer is a desire that actually reaches the Creator. There are only two forces in the world: the forces of reception (attraction) and bestowal (rejection). And there is a law of the equivalence of form: In the degree of their similarity, the forces (objects) grow closer, and in the degree of their difference, they grow apart.

Since the Creator is an absolute will to bestow, He “expects” from us equivalence with Him, where the will to receive would desire to become similar to Him and also become the force of bestowal. To ensure this, He placed His spark, “the point in the heart,” the initial point of the quality of bestowal, into the will to receive, our nature. And we must cultivate it.

The Creator responds only to a prayer for this. All other kinds of prayers don’t reach Him. The Creator hears the prayer of everybody who is asking for the force of bestowal. The Creator is the law of bestowal, so he reacts to no pleas but those asking for the ability to bestow. And if we don’t ask for it, He sends us even greater suffering so that we may realize for what we should be asking.
[21407]
From the Lesson on Rabash’s Article, 9/17/10

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Question: When we read The Zohar, I am constantly picturing things in this world. What should I do?

Answer: That doesn’t matter. If you wish to see the Creator behind this corporeal picture, then it is a good thing. Gradually the corporeal pictures, such as "home," "Abraham," "plants," and "animals" will turn into a picture of traits and qualities. All the words will begin to give you a sensory impression because everything is, in fact, depicted within our feelings.

If you are only seeing corporeal images and pictures right now, it is because for the time being, you are living in the picture of this world that you are used to. However, the Light will gradually cause you to feel traits, qualities, and forces. Instead of words denoting people, inanimate objects, plants, and animals, you will begin to feel the qualities of each of them within you and the correlations between them. Then, you will begin to piece together the picture of these states from your inner, sensory impressions. This picture will be arranged in you from the qualities of all the details of the narrative.
[21563]
From the 2nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/20/10, The Zohar

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