Audio Version Of The Blog – 4/24/25
Posted on April 24th, 2025
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The one who seeks the truth is the one who needs the light of faith. (Baal HaSulam, Shamati 41, “What Is Greatness and Smallness in Faith?”).
Faith is a condition when I act as if I am in front of the Creator in absolute attainment, connection, love, and mutual understanding with Him.
Then I am in complete faith.
Question: Can the light of faith be felt as something I can share?
Answer: The light of faith is a feeling of connection with the Creator. Of course, it is always lacking, so we must constantly ask for it.
[R328305]
From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/19/24, Writings of Baal HaSulam “What Is Greatness and Smallness in Faith?”
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Comment: Most people perceive Passover as a week of celebration. Yet suddenly you are saying that this is a state one can be in every day.
My Response: The moment I discover within myself that I am under the control of Pharaoh (egoism) and that I somehow need to rise above it, to exit it, I immediately try to make every possible effort to overcome it.
But on my own, I cannot conquer the ego; I don’t fight it; I even love it. This is the most important thing a person must understand! After all, egoism helps me rise. It is said that one must thank for the bad just as for the good. Great is the one who can turn their enemy into a beloved one.
If you look at egoism the right way, then we need this force. That is why it is said that Pharaoh brought the people of Israel closer to the Creator. If we did not have an evil inclination, if we did not experience suffering, we would never feel the need for connection with the upper force, with the Creator.
But we are now considering this question on a practical, corporeal level. If we are in a state of constant egoistic growth, then Passover is an example of rising above the ego for us. It is not for nothing that it is said: in every generation, a person must see himself as if he was coming out of Egypt.
“Generation” here means every moment in time, because every change within me is considered a new generation. I must always feel as if I am coming out of Egypt even though immediately I fall into a new Egypt, and again I come out, and again I fall. In this way, I quickly complete all my corrections and reach the goal.
How is this achieved? The wisdom of Kabbalah gives a very simple explanation: through connection! The final goal we must reach is “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and this can be attained only through all possible efforts to draw closer to one another.
Kabbalah explains which efforts exactly. After all, our world is full of various ideas, theories, and practices. Everything people have come up with has been drawn from different philosophies, religions, beliefs, and psychological tricks as a substitute for the wisdom of Kabbalah.
Humanity has been searching for a way to tame its egoism because it tears us apart. It prevents us from living in families, from communicating with friends, and from interacting correctly with one another. What can be done with nature itself? Why is it set against us? And it is not just nature, man himself is set against himself!
People do not have the correct method of education. Therefore, they introduced laws that suppress, constrain, and diminish egoism in attempts to subdue it. Suppression is the foundation of all religions. But what we need is a method that would balance egoism so that each person could use it correctly and not suppress it!
The revolutionary aspect of the wisdom of Kabbalah lies in the free development of egoism and in rising above it afterward.
Kabbalah brings a person to a state of freedom. You are not ashamed, you do not scold yourself, you do not blame others. You simply must constantly strive to reveal the method of complementing egoism with its opposite force so they would work together correctly.
Egoism would raise the altruistic force, the force of love, and together they would work in a harmonious symbiosis, rolling back and forth: pe-sach, pe-sach.
It is impossible to do without the exile from the good quality of love into the qualities that Egypt embodies: cruelty, hatred, and control. But suddenly, when these qualities are covered with love, you no longer feel them as such, and you carry them out from love even though it might seem that you are strictly constrained.
In order to love your neighbor as yourself, you must care for everyone! So where is your freedom in that? On the contrary! You constantly think only about what others lack and how you could help them. In the end, where is the “I”?
It is a paradox, but through love, you forget about yourself, and then you are completely free. You are in constant motion, in constant care, yet it is sweet, and there is nothing more joyful. It is like a mother caring for her baby, and it gives her immense pleasure.
That is why we simply need to understand how egoism begins to work together with the quality of love in such a harmony that we no longer feel it as egoism. We need it; without it, we would not feel any positive sensations.
I can feel another precisely because I do not want it, but by inversely turning it into a new object, I receive new feelings. In other words, the greater the hatred, the greater the love.
It is written in The Book of Zohar that the students of Rabbi Shimon, who wrote it, felt deep hatred toward each other before each lesson, and then, as they began to unite, they created love. Only in this way were they able to attain this spiritual quality and describe it in The Book of Zohar.
They had to feel a burning hatred in order to then rise above it and reveal, in place of the consuming fire of hatred, the fire of love. Only from the contrast of these two qualities were they able to describe the immense illumination they attained.
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From KabTV’s “Conversations about Passover”, Episode #2
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Question: Why is the desire to receive considered one-tenth of the desire?
Answer: Because that is how it how it feels.
Question: How can I feel that I am exiting my desire to receive and that this is the Sof of the Partzuf that I am leaving, that I am unable to work with?
Answer: It does not work that way. You feel one hundred percent of the attainment of the Creator and do not wish to divide it into one-tenth and nine-tenths. You want to act just as the Creator acts upon you. That is what corrected desire is.
[343052]
From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/14/25, Writings of Baal HaSulam “What Is Greatness and Smallness in Faith?”
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Question: How do we add faith? Is this something we do ourselves?
Answer: The Creator does it, but it is thanks to the fact that we constantly, all together want to increase faith. Each does so in their our way, but, in principle, together. We want to be in perfect faith.
Perfect faith is faith that completely replaces knowledge, sensation, and everything we can receive from the Creator.
Question: How can we help each other achieve a constant lack of faith that will ultimately replace our knowledge and feelings?
Answer: Friends can show an example and support, and then you will see what you lack to gain complete faith.
[328340]
From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/19/24, Writings of Baal HaSulam “What Is Greatness and Smallness in Faith?”
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Talks about the Steps of the Ladder, Part 113
Can We Determine What Desires We Are in During the Stage of Preparation?
During the stage of preparation, we cannot determine what desires we are in. We do not know where reception or bestowal are. We do not know or understand exactly what we are working on.
The key to correct work during the preparation stage is to attribute everything to the upper one. This is because the lowest spiritual state that we enter and are included in, after crossing the barrier (Machsom), is called “embryo” (Ubar). It is a state where we annul ourselves before the upper one and let the upper one act on us as it wills. This is called attributing everything to the upper one and recognizing the greatness of the Creator, that He is the one acting and that He does everything within and around us.
This is the truth, yet we must exercise it because we cannot fully attribute everything to the upper one. It repeatedly slips away from us, and we must return to this truth again and again, wash our minds with it, and convince ourselves that it is indeed the case. But we simply cannot do it on our own because only by seeing the Creator, by experiencing this reality firsthand, can we be convinced.
The will to receive is very pragmatic. “Show me and that’s it.” “Let me taste it.” Why do the sources write that “Taste and see that the Lord is good”? Why is tasting necessary? Why is seeing not enough? It is because only by tasting do we receive a clear sensory picture of what we have experienced, just as young children and infants experience objects and perceive them through their sense of taste. This is the most reliable sense. That is why infants do not settle for just seeing, but they put everything in their mouths to taste.
Similarly, until we taste the Creator as inner light (Ohr Pnimi), we have no clear knowledge of what He is. That is why we cannot attain true knowledge before the barrier is opened for us, before light enters our vessels.
We must long for the first spiritual state that is closest to us. If we desire all the opportunities given to us from above, if we exhaust all of our possibilities, then we truly enter that state because we have made all the necessary effort.
When does effort come to an end? We do not know this in advance. It depends on the structure of each individual soul. What is the sign that the work is complete? It is when the heavens open. Until then, we must simply continue to act.
The entire Torah, for beginners as well as for those who will later ascend the steps to the end of correction, is contained in the first article of Shamati entitled “There Is None Else Besides Him.” Beyond the barrier, the work assumes a different form. However, the task is always, in every state, to reach the feeling that “There is none else besides Him” regardless of what happens and no matter what will happen.
We must overcome resistance and reach this feeling without disconnecting from the reality of this world. It is unwise to live in an isolated place. We need to live in the whole of reality, through which all kinds of disturbances influence us, engage with us, and through them find “There is none else besides Him.”
If we complete this work, we have finished our work in this world and will encounter other, spiritual disturbances. Through these, we continue to progress, drawing closer and closer to fully realizing “There is none else besides Him.”
What does “There is none else besides Him” mean? It is the absolute knowledge that, in the end, the Creator, ourselves, and the entire path we have traversed—the actions, the disturbances, the uncorrected and corrected desires—are one.
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Preparation to the Lesson
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1st part of the Lesson — “Holocaust Remembrance Day”
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2nd part of the Lesson — Writings of Baal HaSulam, “Introduction to The Book of Zohar“
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Selected Highlights
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