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We are in the midst of the holiday of #Hanukkah
Hanukkah (Hanu-Koh) is a stop on the path.
We need to stop and think about where we are going…

It is my wish for you to stop for this break and think: What train would I like to get on, where, to what goal, will it take me as it toots…?
From Twitter, 12/3/18

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The direct, natural reaction of the desire for the Light is programmed and known in advance, so there is no creation here. After all, “creation” (Beria) means “outside of state” (bar), that is, something new. The creation begins with the opportunity given to the desire to respond in an unnatural way, not instinctively, but according to different, extraneous criterion. The desire has to love the Light not for all kinds of pleasant fillings, but for the fact that the Light is elevated, special, giving, and has exceptional, noble qualities, peculiar only to the Light.

It turns out that the created being appreciates the Light precisely for the fact that it behaves in the opposite way to the nature of the desire: as giving and able to act outside its interest. The desire appreciates this quality. While enjoying the filling, the desire simultaneously realizes that the Light brings pleasure to it, fills it, cares for, and tends to it. It begins to appreciate this attitude like a child who grew up and appreciates his parents’ love and care. In this way, the Kli begins to appreciate the Creator.

In order to elevate the creation to its degree of bestowal, the Creator takes direct pleasures away from it, and enables it to fill itself and enjoy bestowal and not receiving.

In our life, we implement the same scenario. In infancy, we enjoy receiving from our parents, using them and demanding from them. Yet as we grow older, we gradually become separated from our parents, to this extent we begin to understand what they have done for us, and we treat our children in the same way.

The Creator leads us to independence, which appears when we move from the property of receiving to the property of bestowal, that is, when we use our desire to enjoy for the sake of bestowal in order to bring enjoyment to the Creator and not to ourselves.

This desire should come from us and should not be imposed by the Light. However, this is possible only under the condition that we are in the ten and bestow to each other, internally connecting with each other. Then through this connection, we receive the Light. We demand through the ten this special power of bestowal and use it. Although this energy of bestowal does not belong to us, we can form the need for it in ourselves.

Instead of the instinctive need for filling and enjoying filling ourselves, we want the power of bestowal and enjoyment from it. This is the purpose of creation: that all created beings enjoy bestowal, following the example of the Creator.

Love Is Stronger Than Nature

The prayer of the common man is to feel pleasant at every moment, and all inanimate nature, plants, and animals ask the same. It is an ordinary, instinctive prayer felt by a person as natural self-care or as the influence of a religion that teaches a person to turn to the Creator with a request for filling.

However, there is a method that teaches us to demand not an egoistic filling in this and in the next world, but the opportunity to become similar to the Creator, to His actions, and enjoy bestowal. Also, you can enjoy bestowal only when you love the one to whom you bestow, as parents enjoy bestowing to their child. By virtue of their love for the children, a parent receives from bestowing to a child even more than if he would take for himself.

This is a proof that love can be stronger than nature. Indeed, we see in inanimate nature, plants, and animals many examples when parents die for their offspring. Their instinct pushes them to sacrifice themselves. It turns out that bestowal illuminated by the power of love is stronger than the desire to enjoy.

Therefore, there are two kinds of prayer. The first one is the prayer of “people in the street” about selfish filling, enjoyment, confidence in the present and in the future, which may be unconscious, instinctive, or conscious. The second prayer is no longer that of one in the street, but in accordance with the Torah, that is, a request for the power of bestowal. In bestowal, the action itself is important and not its result, and I enjoy the fact that I do not expect any response from this action: it comes out of me and this is where everything ends for me. This is what the prayer is devoted to: to receive the ability to bestow, to fill your neighbor according to the example of the Creator, and thereby bestow pleasure to the Creator.¹
From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 11/25/18, Lesson on the Topic “How do We Organize Ourselves for Prayer”
1 Minute 4:05

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Question: How should we look at the friends: Are they higher than me, or are we all equal?

Answer: I do not care if they are higher or lower; I am prepared to work in all the stages! I have to relate to them differently.

After all, in the states of reception and bestowal in which we must achieve our unity, there is no higher and lower. There, each one is both higher and lower than the others since each of us has his own special qualities. I must give them to the whole large Kli (vessel), to the entire soul, and receive from it what I need for correct functioning.

Therefore, only when we care about the general state of the soul that is called either Adam or the Creator (depending on what we are talking about—either about the structure of the system itself or about its filling), can we talk about correct work. Only the connection with the Creator, or aspiration for this connection, gives us the basis for the correct work.

Question: Do I need to pay attention to the fact that friends’ aspiration to the Creator is stronger than mine?

Answer: If a person feels this way, it  drives him forward.

It is written: “The end of an act is in the preliminary thought”; that is, it determines the beginning of the action. Therefore, the main thing for me is to determine the Creator: what it is, what I am looking for, where I can go, what I aspire to, what state I see as my goal, and based on this, I will already be looking at what I need for achieving this goal.

Question: When I hold a goal before me, in what am I lower than my friends in the spiritual work in the group?

Answer: If any great Kabbalist finds himself in the smallest group, he will still be in something lower than them because he needs to have a connection with them so that they would influence him with their desires, hopes, and thoughts. He must receive from them their desires and their aspirations.

Without this, he will not be able to actively participate in the group, even if he is the greatest. He needs to be lower than them, to serve them in order to receive their aspiration to the Creator. Then, he will be able to work with these aspirations.
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From KabTV’s “The Last Generation” 5/9/18

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Right now is a special period of time of the holiday of Hanukkah. But, in essence, Hanukkah is a process that exists until the very end of correction and is experienced at the beginning of every new degree.

Each time new informational records (Reshimot) from the shattering are revealed in us, we need to make a restriction, a screen, and reflected light, all of which is the essence of the Hanukkah correction.

We are always trying to remain within reason, to live according to our earthly intellect and experience, our habitual egoism accepted by this world. But in contrast, we need to build a different form. All that we see, experience, and understand with our hearts and minds is revealed only within our egoistic organs of perception, as it is written: “They have eyes and see not, they have ears but hear not.”

We want to experience what is happening in the desire to bestow, which is called faith above reason, deciding that everything comes from one upper force, the good that does good. And so each moment.

There are moments we are able to do this and other times we are not successful, but this war goes on continuously. Essentially, this is the war of the Maccabees against the Greeks. This war is being waged within reason, within our experience of this world, our rational minds and our philosophies, within our egoistic mind with which we built so many systems of connections between us.

We are fighting to establish a different form of existence, acknowledging that all our sensory experiences and perceptions are wrong. This is a false picture, a false perception of reality, because it appears within the egoistic mind.

Through the perception of reality within our rational minds, we need to try to feel that everything comes from only one, absolutely benevolent upper force. And every form perceived within the mind is only given to us in order to raise us to different perception, to faith above reason.

In other words, we agree that everything comes from the Creator and this is the specific form with which He can bring us to the true perception of reality, to the world of truth. We must try to establish the truth at every moment 24 hours every day, despite all the impressions in one’s earthly feelings and rational mind, which are not subject to doubt, that is, within reason.

Also, we do not run from this rational perception, because “…one against the other He created them.” We do not cross anything out, we only try to process it correctly: one against the other until we are able to develop understanding above reason for each understanding within reason.

That is how we attain the perception of spiritual reality and begin to function on two levels: on the material level, observing all its laws and rules accepted among the people of this world, and also in the true spiritual reality.

Then the upper Light is revealed because we are now able to light the jug of oil according to all the conditions, and in this way, we attain the revelation of the Creator and the upper world.

During the day, one day after the next, and every moment, we must try to see ourselves in this battle, imagining the picture within reason and juxtaposed against it, the picture above reason. This is the war of the Maccabees against the Greeks: Greeks are within reason and the Maccabees are above it.
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/14/17, Lesson on the Topic: “Hanukkah by the Wisdom of Kabbalah”

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Lesson Preparation

Lesson on the Topic “Hanukkah”

Talmud Eser Sefirot,  Vol. 6, Part 16,  Table of Answers for the Meaning of the Words, Item 121

Writings of Baal HaSulam, “The Peace”, Article “Clarification of the Excerpt from the Mishnah: “Everything Is in Deposit, and a Fortress Spreads Over All of Life”

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