All holidays symbolize special states in the spiritual elevation of a person. If we work as we should, then from year to year, day by day, we climb the spiritual ladder more and more until we reach complete adhesion with the Creator.

The ascent above egoism is called Passover, the exit from Egypt, and the acquiring of the force of bestowal is called the holiday of Shavuot.

Then a person judges himself and sees that he is not capable of giving, which is called the 9th of Av. And then he decides to start his whole life anew with a new relation to the Creator, which is called the New Year, Rosh HaShanah.

And the most important thing is to make a correct calculation of how to enter this new period, this new time. Many times in his life, a person wanted to change his life and, as though, start it all over again. This is a sign of the Day of Judgment, Yom Kippur, one of the days that a person must pass through to achieve equivalence with the Creator.

Yom Kippur comes from the word “atonement” (Kapara); it is when a person asks for forgiveness from the Creator. After all, he tested himself and saw that many times he had the opportunity to correct himself and achieve adhesion with the Creator, but he neglected this and could not overcome his egoism.

A month before Yom Kippur, a person begins to check himself and sees that he is in egoistic desires to get pleasure for himself and does not want to use them to correct himself and get closer to the Creator. And for this he asks for forgiveness, one realizes that at that time he did not have any strength and opportunity to overcome his pride and ask for help. After all, our entire correction consists in asking the Creator for the power of correction.

It turns out that our whole crime is that we did not ask for help, and we should ask for forgiveness for this. “I am sorry I did not ask,” which means, to ask the Creator to forgive us for not turning to Him with a request to correct us.

The Creator created egoism, but man must realize that egoism is the only evil that exists in him. Through the prism of this evil, we look at the whole world and therefore the whole world seems bad to us. And in accordance with this we relate to the Creator because this whole spoiled picture of the world allegedly comes from Him. It turns out that we blame the Creator for making us and this world so bad.

And at this moment, a person does not realize that the Creator gave him egoism and the ability to look through it at the whole world in order to ask the Creator to correct this egoism and replace the evil nature with a good one.

This is the person’s work. The only thing we need to do is to know the evil contained in us and realize that the Creator gave it intentionally so that we would turn to Him and ask Him to replace egoism and the inability to do good deeds, to correct all the evil to good.

After all, there are no good forces in us and there will not be if we do not ask for them from the Creator, and then we will be able to feel and see the whole world through a good desire. Then the world will seem like a real paradise to us.

Therefore, all our work is to reveal our evil, the reason why we see evil around and inside ourselves, and then turn to the Creator to turn this evil into good. This work is done by the Creator and therefore it is called the work of the Creator (Avodat Hashem). And the request for the Creator to do this is called the day of repentance, Yom Kippur.

It turns out that this is not a day of mourning, but a day of joy because we judge ourselves and see that in order to correct our condition, we only need to ask the Creator to turn the evil desire with which He created us into a good desire.

So, we have someone to turn to and what to ask for. And everything depends only on our request. And the whole past, when we were weak and unable to do good deeds, were confused and insignificant slaves of our nature that dominates us in everything, all was deliberately created by the Creator to show us our powerlessness and awaken in us the desire to free ourselves from our egoism and turn it into bestowal.

This is the main meaning of the Day of Judgment, Yom Kippur, when we ask the Creator to take away our evil, egoistic desire and turn it into a good, altruistic desire, into love. And then we will climb up from a deep hole to a high mountain.

Therefore Yom Kippur is the most significant day of the year when we spend all 24 hours thinking about how to ask for forgiveness for our weaknesses, all the evil that we have created in our egoism that was given by the Creator. And since we decide that this evil was created in us by the Creator, we have the opportunity to turn to Him and ask for the power of good instead of this evil. As a result of this request, we will gain more and more forces of good and will rise higher and higher until the very end of correction.

It turns out that each of us and all of us together should do this work not only once a year, on Yom Kippur, according to the calendar, but every day and as much as possible we should turn to the Creator and ask Him to turn our evil inclination into a good inclination. To the extent of our ability to turn to the Creator and demand this correction, we will be able to become like Him and achieve adhesion with Him and perfection, i.e., the end of correction.

This is what you need to think about and try to implement in the next twenty-four hours.
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From the 2^nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/15/21, “Yom Kippur – The Day of Atonement”

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