Question: You are a person with a certain character. How can you distinguish the spiritual in you and where are just the whims of your corporeal nature?

Answer: I think it merges together. Naturally I have a temper, irritability, and nervousness. But outwardly, this imposes only some kind of “interface” on the reaction, which, undoubtedly, is built on a spiritual vision. This is what is written about Kabbalists.

My teacher Rabash knew how to restrain and hide his emotions. I knew what was happening, and looking at him, I was simply amazed at how he could do it! He had tremendous strength and the ability to suppress his external manifestations, the flashes of what was literally exploding in him.

But he lived in a different time, in a different society. He was surrounded by strangers, opponents who did not love him, Kabbalah or his students. However these were people near him who constantly communicated with him. In general, this is a problem.

I have a different problem: I flare up and I pull everything out of myself. Perhaps it somehow makes me feel better later on, although, of course I regret it very much. We are all people; no matter who is at what level, but still people.

Rabash internally suffered a lot, but his students knew nothing about it. I was forbidden to talk about it, even if I saw something. As a result, at the end of his life he suffered several heart attacks because of this and died.

Of course we could have prevented all this by correcting ourselves for many years, during which he restrained himself. He did not say anything to anyone, and did not point out any mistakes to them, only to me.

Sometimes he pointed out to me in such a way that I would have been happy at that moment to disappear forever from the world. It was a terrible feeling of shame, of one’s own insignificance.

He knew how to create such a feeling in me with a single word, even with some gesture. Of course this was not an external, but an internal gesture, since he was internally connected with me and could control me as he pleased. It is terrible to be next to a person who absolutely knows you and controls all your thoughts, desires, and impulses. You sit next to him, think about something, and he can tell you: “Let’s switch to something else.”

Better not to know about this. Because when you get involved in common work with such a person, it is very obliging.

But on the other hand, you feel like a child in the arms of a mother: naked, not ashamed of anything, and you give yourself to him and that is it. You understand that he does not manipulate you, but leaves you complete freedom of actions, and even more than that he sees that you make mistakes and he worries. You keep making them because without them you will not learn anything.

In general, what the upper Partzuf experiences, i.e., a teacher in relation to a student, is indescribable.
In our global group, things are much simpler. This is a huge community, humanity, which I feel, take into myself, and therefore all this is softened in it, somehow leveled out due to the scale.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Teacher” 4/30/11

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