Baal HaSulam, Shamati #86, “And They Built Store-Cities”:  This is the meaning of  “And they built Arei Miskenot,” meaning that this was for Israel. In other words, all their work during the exile was taken into Pharaoh’s custody, and Israel remained poor. We should also interpret Miskenot from the word Sakana (danger), meaning that they were in great danger of remaining in that state for the rest of their lives.

It is known that after great ascents, like after a convention, for example, where we become illuminated and enthusiastic, after that, problems in the group are discovered. People still don’t understand, how after such a good state, suddenly it becomes so bad and dark. All strength disappears; there is hopelessness, injustice, and disconnection.

It is necessary to learn from this, that which is called human nature. This is not some kind of game where I follow what is happening outside, like on a theater stage. Everything happens inside of me, and here everything is completely different. This is the game of life.

So what is required from us is lots of patience and strengthening (itgabrut) in order to be a man (Gever) and hold back.  After that, much of this becomes habit and second nature. We get used to ascents and descents by understanding that it’s impossible without them.

And precisely by means of them, we pass through characteristics from Kedusha (holiness) to Klipa (impurity) and from Klipa to Kedusha and we begin to work with them above the Machsom, already above the Masach, and we build the Kav Emtzai (middle line). But all of this is possible only if we behave by “holding oneself back during a dispute.” (Babylonian Talmud Hullin 89a)
[132120]
From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/08/14, Shamati #86

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Question: Is Emuna (faith) work within the desires of others?

Answer: So that the Emuna can develop in the substance of the desire to enjoy, the Kli was shattered into many fragments. This makes it possible for us to work with and to evaluate the characteristic of bestowal, to begin to play with it a bit, even when we are in an egoistic desire of one hundred percent and have no ability or chance of reaching bestowal. We are allowed to engage in make-believe, imaginary bestowal, like little children who play by imitating adults.

Certainly we are not ready to go out of ourselves from this physical state where only the ego is at work. If they take even a drop of egoistic pleasure away from us, we immediately fall. But the idea is that the Light that Reforms influences us in response to all of our efforts to reach bestowal. Even though these efforts and attempts are in order to receive, and it could be that they are detrimental to society, if they are somehow close to the right direction or even if they are opposite to it, if they are related to the right direction, then the Light has an influence.

The Light is influential either in the form of Panim (face) or in the form of Achoraim (back). I can yearn for a goal directly and I can describe it as completely opposite and reach it from the reverse side, as if I am flying there from around the globe. But I am thinking about it, so the Light influences me nonetheless! The Light reacts and influences all of my actions, either from the front or from the back, and it could be also between this and that.

This is like a child who still hasn’t grown up and plays and breaks everything, but this is the way he learns and develops. We advance like this also. I remember in childhood I had to open and take every new toy apart to see what there was inside. In general, children love to break everything, and that is how they develop and advance. So the work of the Light is important here.
[132171]
From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/08/14, Shamati #86

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A prayer to the Creator should always be collective. After all, what do I ask for? Feeling hatred, a gap, and the inability to connect to others, I ask the Creator to help me overcome these states. Then I can pray for everyone with everyone.

All our differences, when we can’t work together or gather and discuss something is a great state!  But the feeling of repulsion will constantly grow stronger. We know the students of Rabbi Shimon who wrote The Book of Zohar used to gather, but at the same time, were ready to burn each other to ashes, since they felt such great mutual hatred between them. These are the states we have to go through.

The revelation of hatred actually appears in groups that advance. If a person escapes from this and stops coming to the group, he simply doesn’t understand what is going on. He doesn’t understand that everything comes from the Creator, that there is none else besides Him, that all this is necessary so that he will be corrected, and that the group should rise by its correction above all the conflicts.

If we feel real hatred, it is the condition that leads us to our collective prayer. By collecting all our mutual hatred, we have to ascend above it, because this is our common problem, and then we will discover the spiritual world. Now the condition for the revelation of the Creator is right before us.
[32027]
From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/28/14, Question and Answers with Dr. Laitman

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The Book of Zohar, “VaYikra,” Item 63: A person shall sacrifice means to take out the one who has not wedded a wife, since his sacrifice is not a sacrifice, and he has no blessings, neither upwards or downwards.

This means that it says a person shall sacrifice, and he is different, and he is not a man and is not part of mankind, and the Shechina does not dwell upon him, since he is flawed and is called an invalid, and an invalid should keep away from everyone, and all the more so from the altar in order to bring a sacrifice.

An unmarried person is a person who doesn’t want to work with his ego. He has only one part, the male part.

In our world it’s expressed in a person who doesn’t want to take upon himself the special burden of worrying about a family and prefers to lie comfortably on the sofa, reading the paper, or watching a football game on TV. Whereas, in the spiritual world, he doesn’t want to work with his ego. Therefore, he cannot be called Adam, a human being, since Adam is the image we gradually raise inside us by correcting our ego to altruism.

By building an image inside us that resembles the Creator, we attain the state of Adam, which means the one who resembles the Creator. A person who really engages in spiritual correction always clarifies his ego, struggles with it, and discovers its correct form. It’s the work a man has to do with his “wife,” with his other half, which he builds inside his corrected ego.

Question: How is this expressed in our world?

Answer: Today the role of women in the process of spiritual correction is very important. They understand the method of correction correctly and take an active part in fulfilling it. I truly bless their actions and their serious impulses and their yearning for the goal. They help each other greatly and they also help the men.

As our world develops, there is an increasingly greater need for their participation, which confirms the saying that the man is the head and the woman is the neck, and when the neck turns, the head also turns in the same direction.
[132016]
From KabTV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 10/24/13

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In the News (from The Economist): “Faith in democracy flares up in moments of triumph, such as the overthrow of unpopular regimes in Cairo or Kiev, only to sputter out once again. Outside the West, democracy often advances only to collapse. And within the West, democracy has too often become associated with debt and dysfunction at home and overreach abroad.

“Adjusting to hard times will be made even more difficult by a growing cynicism towards politics. Party membership is declining across the developed world: only 1% of Britons are now members of political parties compared with 20% in 1950. Voter turnout is falling, too: a study of 49 democracies found that it had declined by 10 percentage points between 1980-84 and 2007-13. A survey of seven European countries in 2012 found that more than half of voters ‘had no trust in government’ whatsoever. A YouGov opinion poll of British voters in the same year found that 62% of those polled agreed that ‘politicians tell lies all the time.’

“Many Chinese are prepared to put up with their system if it delivers growth. The 2013 Pew Survey of Global Attitudes showed that 85% of Chinese were ‘very satisfied’ with their country’s direction, compared with 31% of Americans. 

“Wang Jisi, also of Beijing University, has observed that ‘many developing countries that have introduced Western values and political systems are experiencing disorder and chaos’ and that China offers an alternative model.”

My Comment: The egoistic stages of human development have gone through five stages of evolutionary development and had exhausted themselves by the beginning of the 21^st century, and now push humanity to the new stage, altruism, i.e., they need to be replaced by the new stages of development, by the five steps of the property of bestowal and love.

Awareness of the necessity of this rise is problematic because it presupposes the need to admit oneself below nature, to obey its integrality and globality, and to learn how to reach similarity with it (adhesion with it).
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The spiritual world is a world of qualities which is dominated by the attribute of bestowal, the force of bestowal, the attribute of love and giving. If a person has this attribute, it means that he is in the spiritual world.

If an opposite property dominates a person, the attribute of receiving, and he is totally immersed in it, it means that he is in the corporeal world.

Everything depends on the force that operates in you, that dominates you and that manages you. If it is the force of receiving, egoistic desires and calculations, it means that you feel the corporeal world and live in it. But if you suddenly acquire the force of bestowal and are incorporated in it, it means that you are in the spiritual world. We cannot imagine the difference between the two worlds. It is impossible to describe or to explain it.

Because the desire to receive needs to be corrected and its power is revealed temporarily, when it is over and succumbs to the domination of the desire to bestow, we are also in a desire to receive, in the perishable temporary matter, as we are born, live, and die. It is a replica of the spiritual force, the desire to receive, after seventy years, seventy levels, must disappear and turn into a desire to bestow.

Exile is a feeling in the desire to receive that has to undergo a change and reach the form of bestowal. The created being cannot bestow; he can only be a desire to receive, while bestowal is the attribute of the Creator. But when the desire to receive works with the intention of in order to bestow and enslaves itself to others and to the Creator, it means that it bestows.

Thus we can be in only two states; Pharaoh’s slave working for the desire to receive, or the Creator’s servant working for the desire to bestow. All our work is to help ourselves and the whole world reach the desire to bestow and to delight the Creator.

If we don’t add this goal, it isn’t a desire to bestow anymore. The desire to bestow can be expressed only in one way, by delighting the Creator, because then this desire, this inclination, is detached from me and doesn’t receive a reward. It does come from me, but doesn’t return to me.

If I operate for the sake of the created beings, the friends, the group, and don’t intend to delight the Creator by that, it means that I don’t follow the line of bestowal to the end and that I still operate for my own sake. Only if I intend to reach the Creator is my intention relatively pure, according to my level.
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From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/7/14, Writings of the Ari

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The Book of Zohar, “VaYikra,” item 73: All the sacrifices are male and female, since the sacrifice is above the heart, which is about the thought that is above the heart. And it shall be known what is about the heart, which means the thought.

The thought that is clever is considered a male, and the heart is considered a female, Bina, the heart understands that it receives from Hochma and because the sacrifice rises upwards, it is all male.

There is no point trying to picture all the allegories in the Torah (the sacrifice, the fire, the smoke, etc.) according to corporeal concepts. Everything has to be above the thought, and the thought is totally abstract.

This refers to inner emotional corrections only, which a person performs on his desires and his intentions, and nothing more. The Torah doesn’t oblige us to perform these actions on the physical level.

We know that in the last days of the second Temple, people did everything that is written in the Torah very enthusiastically and even burnt poor animals, but did not engage in inner correction, so the second Temple was destroyed. The same thing happened with the first Temple, which was on an even higher spiritual level.

This is how the complete fall of humanity to the corporeal level gradually happened, and the inner correction gave way to mechanical actions.

We shouldn’t take all the instructions in the Torah literally, because if it says that we have to eat the sacrifices, it means that we have to receive the Light of Hochma, the Light of wisdom in the corrected desires, and not that we should literally eat meat.

The allegories in the Torah are so confusing for a person who is not prepared that they summon totally different images and feelings in him that are related to our material world. The transition from this language to the real meaning of the Torah, that speaks only about spiritual actions, is a great problem.
[132012]
From KabTV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 10/24/13

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Question: Is working in Lo Lishma (not For Her name) within reason?

Answer: Working in Lo Lishma is within reason, and it can be on different levels, but what is the meaning of levels in Lo Lishma? Could it be that I am working 99% in Lo Lishma and 1% in Lishma (For Her Name), or 1% in Lo Lishma and 99% in Lishma, which means that I have attained such a high level that there is only 1% that I must correct before I am totally in Lishma?

No, it doesn’t work that way. The levels of Lo Lishma and Lishma are levels of ascent toward the attribute of Bina, to bestow in order to bestow without using vessels of receiving. So, we don’t work with vessels of receiving in order to reach Lishma but must constantly be above them.

Some of them may belong to holiness, to bestowal, and some not; it is divided into different times. It is like a ladder on which you seem to be standing with one foot on one step and the other foot on a different step because the moment the Light raises you just a little above your desire to receive, it performs a restriction in you.

The parts that are below the Chazeh of the Partzuf are restricted. You ask for this restriction because it is only after the restriction that you can speak about vessels of bestowal. True Lishma begins only after the restriction of the desires.
[131975]
From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/6/14, Writings of Rabash

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There was single, whole Kli that was full of Light; after that it was shattered. The Kli (Neshama) wanted to receive in order to bestow with all of its might and not be separate; it did not discern that within it were desires that were not directed towards reception in order to bestow, that some kind of desire was left there that had never been revealed from the beginning of creation called the stony heart.

And so the Kli (vessel), this Neshama (soul), was shattered, and the Light that this Kli was intended to hold was removed and became Ohr Makif (Surrounding Light).  In Ohr Makif there are two characteristics; the Light that was removed that was within the Kli and filled it, and the Light that was removed that held the Kli that initially created it in order to bestow.

These two characteristics are found in the Light; the Light of correction and the Light of fulfillment. We must understand that these two Lights act only according to our lack of them. First we need a Light that connects. If the deficiency is not directed towards connection, then the Light doesn’t work. We don’t attract it and we don’t invite it.

The Light can be attracted only through our lack, consistent to its action, so that we will be directed towards each other; I to it and it to me. Therefore a prayer must be for connection, for the Kli was shattered, and its connection is the only thing that the Light performs at our request.

And without our request, the Light performs another thousand actions, which it does anyway. So before we read The Zohar, we need to direct ourselves correctly: ask for connection if we want to attain some kind of result from our study.

A person can sit for 20 or 30 years next to the book, as if he is present in a group, but if he doesn’t artificially develop a desire for connection, through all kinds of texts, videos, conversations and so forth, then he remains without a prayer, meaning without help from Above.

He is still included in the study, but studying like this is through a long and difficult path, requiring a long time and passing through unpleasant conditions. So let us be wise and understand that we have the opportunity and support to heed the advice of the Kabbalists and let us invest the necessary effort.
[131971]
From the 2^nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/06/14, The Book of Zohar

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