Question: While speaking about dissemination, you once said, “If you are able to not curse the Creator, then you can go into the masses.” You are constantly working with this, to justify Him through the masses?

Answer: It depends on what degree. It is written, “Don’t believe in yourself until the complete death of your egoism.” I can be led through such states, such torments, such visions… No one can vouch for themselves. I am not Rabbi Akiva who was skinned.

This is an allegory and the truth, in general, everything together. That is, the final degree of egoism is the skin covering the soul.

Question: To such an extent is a Kabbalist led through such powerful trials?

Answer: Any person, including you. And there is nowhere to go other than rising above these corrections in such a way that you will feel them as redemption rather than suffering.

Everything depends on whether we reject our egoism with the help of the group, with the help of the light that we draw to us when studying Kabbalah. Then, we perceive everything that happens to us as good medicine, as the medicine of life.

But if we do not reject egoism—our body so to say, the body does not mean our flesh that we identify ourselves with but egoism—then we feel enormous suffering, as if we really are being skinned. And we nevertheless come to correction. But these are enormous, very prolonged torments, experienced in the most difficult way.

This is why Kabbalah was given to us in order to do it differently, to rise above the ego and separate from it. When I perform the first restriction (Tzimtzum Aleph) on it, I no longer feel what happens to the ego; it is no longer mine. What does it mean, not mine? It is as if I have received anesthesia. At least in this way.

But afterward, I separate from the ego so much that I do not feel that it belongs to me at all: this is not my body, this is not my egoism, and that is all. It is as if I come out of it and exist separately in the quality of bestowal.

Question: Must we reach such a degree as Rabbi Akiva did so that even in this situation we find a way to justify the Creator?

Answer: Yes, that is how powerfully you have to separate from your former egoistic body, egoistic desires.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. How to Justify Suffering?” 10/27/12

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