Not An Ordeal But No Picnic

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: Why don’t we appreciate the path we follow? Why don’t we receive pleasure at every moment? Even if it isn’t easy, we’re still in a group, we’re together, and this in itself is happiness.

Answer: Actually, there are two sides to the coin. If you come here for the meals and the friendly atmosphere, then things will end here. Your ego won’t let you be attracted to something else. On the other hand, if you feel bad here, your ego won’t let you come here and instead of coming to the lesson, you’ll stay in bed.

So we need both things, both the joy and the frustration. After all there are many people here who have the left line, meaning who are critical. They ask themselves: What can I really get out of life? I don’t want to be just a Hasid. I want to advance. Hasids on any level are happy with what they have and don’t want anything more. But if I don’t want anything, how will I advance? How will I acquire an additional deficiency?

This is exactly what Abraham asked the Creator: “How shall I know that I will inherit it?” In other words: How will I want spiritual ascent? Abraham’s attribute is Hassidim, the Sefira of Hesed, and so he worried about feeling the deficiency to ascend to heights that seem unattainable.

The Creator answered him: “Know of a surety that your seed will be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and they shall afflict them four hundred years….” But what sufferings are we talking about here? About the sufferings you go through by the “Torah and the Mitzvot,” by the Light. These aren’t just bad feelings that you have. “The Egyptian exile” isn’t a synonym for unemployment, lack of money, or health problems. The Egyptian exile is the feeling of deficiency that comes from the posterior of the Light, when you feel that you lack spirituality, love, and adhesion. These are the kind of sufferings we have to reach, and hard work is required here.

This is where the problem is. If we discover the exact deficiencies that we need to connect, we’ll see them on another level, a spiritual one. But instead we look at our corporeal life all the time. Leave that beast alone. It isn’t about it. It’s about spiritual despair that is above everything we have today.

It is spiritual exile and redemption; it is in spiritual aspirations that you build the temple. So let’s start assessing by the right criteria when we feel good or bad and what we enjoy. The point is not the meals themselves and the friends’ meetings, but their content, their inner filling.

We want to go to the Arava again soon. In order to do that we must consolidate a new force, a connection at a higher level. We have to consolidate our efforts in power and in speed in order to acquire new discernments, a new deficiency, to create the spiritual vessel, which is called a prayer before a prayer.

Otherwise it will be just a picnic. If that place reminds us of our previous trip even a little, then it’s even better not to start. We have to be in a totally new state, unprecedented, unidentified, that we’ve never tasted before. We need a totally new spiritual level that will hide the familiar corporeal picture.

On the whole, we need to go through a period of “exile,” that is the preparation for the entry to the “promised land,” to the “Land of Israel,” meaning to the desire that is aimed straight at the Creator (Yashar-El). There all the goodness is already prepared for us, all the fulfillment, but what we need now is the right deficiency for it. But instead, we are drawn to all kinds of “nonsense” in this world.

Let’s hope that we will really arrive at the spiritual deficiency. Then we will go out to the desert for this gathering only to unite with our individual deficiencies prepared for the break through.
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From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/20/12, Baal HaSulam “The Inheritance of the Land”

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